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Whether people came to Art Fair Philippines (Ayala, Makati) to experience aesthetics cannot be judged by the sheer success of what is dubbed “The Best in Philippine Contemporary Art.” My ticket to the exhibit tells me I should be in for an experience of one of a kind that I would regret if I didn’t show up.

My most recent visit to contemporary art scene (before this one) was last year (at Manila Art Exhibit, SM Aura, Taguig City). From that one to Art Fair Philippines, it was the same experience of the politics of art collection. Both were held in malls which have fast transformed into critical sites of modern art collection. Inside the Mall, art throbs or is made to throb like a respiratory center of culture in which art moves, circulates, and distributes the sensible. The exhibit is a form of collecting cultures, and here the mall is also the site of culture where circuits of capital culminate. But it is also in this sense that the Mall renders obscure the many capillary street topologies of the ‘grey’ urban world which throb on their own but which must be necessarily overshadowed by the contemporary colours, line perspectives, etc. by a kind of directing art precepts, within a location boasting of more than thirty galleries, which the mall serves as its functionality as against the traffic of bodies in the metropolis outside.

I mentioned about the politics of art collection to which I should add a kind of aesthetics that this politics communicates using the sublime aura of art. If art scholars still continue to debate about the “communicability of the sublime,” which relies much on the ambiguity of the art-object not to mention varying degrees of taste that foregrounds aesthetic judgment, here is an example of how the sublime arguably communicates without the mediation of theory. I do not mean to defend the notion of unmediated sublime but something else entirely, without saying that I do not agree that there is a ‘sublime.’

Not all who flock to an art exhibit have theories to color their appreciation of art objects or materials with, and I mean ‘color’ as a sign of learned appreciation. But that does not mean they cannot pretend to have and this pretension does have its purpose. As we will explain later, we may expect this color-sign to dismiss that art speaks for itself, a mute speech, a “thought that does not think” (J. Ranciere) but communicates in a way Benjamin would ascribe to ‘Adamic naming.’ (I am dropping these familiar names to zero in on our point of contention later). And as usual, one way to rationalize that art does not speak for itself is to confer a sense of ambiguity to art objects themselves.

The fact that they are ambiguous calls for a mediatized form of appreciation through which something is conveyed, supposedly unfamiliar to the object (if the object can be said to be aware) only to throw it back in circulation, and I mean the circulation of standard appreciations of art forms. (This already presupposes that what is conveyed should conform to the standard the simplest form of which is that art cannot speak for itself. Usually unrecognized as conformity, ‘conformity’ may take on many odd detours). I do not mean that objects are aware of some sort but it can be said that they convey pre-reflective or pre-analytic affordances (J. Gibson) to conscious appreciation. Consciousness is a matter of intensity and its emergent placement in the intensive assemblage of things. Objects do not possess consciousness as we do; however, they may have their own internal process of translation (to borrow a concept popularized by G. Harman) which are affordances in their own right, embedded in situated networks of relations which they do not by themselves create. All these, however, simply tell that art is not a mute speech.

One way or another, art speaks to the human in varying levels of communicability, including its mute pretext (if it does not, it is not art!) which may simply pertain to how consciousness is compartmentalized so that its analytic contents may be employed for specific purposes, purposes that are already reflexively situated within a specific constellation of signs. In relation to the art exhibit, such form of art collection or staging of art-cultures offers a venue for this kind of analytic employment, at least for a specifically sensitive group among the ‘learned’ audience. In this sense we can allow ourselves to say that the exhibit directs the traffic of analytic employments proper to what the art-form conveys.

What about those who do not have formal color-signs and line-graphemes (to play on words referring to color and line perspectives as art terms which carry extra-artistic meanings) to appreciate an art collection? Here is where aesthetics directs its full force and which would unravel aesthetics to be of a different order yet reflexively disguised. Ranciere’s aesthetic unconscious tells us exactly what we mean—that aesthetics corresponds to “particular historical regime of thinking about art and an idea of thought according to which things of art are things of thought” (p. 5 ). What we obtain here is simple: art thinks, though mute or unconscious, pre-reflexive, pre-figurative. But, and this is our contention, insofar as we are already within a constellation of signs pre-arranged on a plane of organization or signification (best described by Deleuze and Guattari as the unconscious tracing of the semiotic machine), the aesthetic unconscious would be another complement of regimentation. In relation to the exhibit, the Mall is one particular site of this semiotic machine allowing those who do not have formal color-signs or line-graphemes to appreciate art as something that does not speak for itself (here, we are playing up the distinction between ‘mass culture’ and ‘popular culture’ where the latter connotes a more active intervention on signs vis-a-vis their enforced, pre-arranged communicability).

That there is a non-discursive, pre-analytic treatment of art, in the final analysis, occults the view from somewhere—that the non-discursive is immanently inscribed by a reflexive placement of this spiritual or aesthetic or what have you kind of essence. This of course obscures the reality that art is a regime. Or, it tells us in the face but too close to distinguish it from what it says. The proximity of the Mall tells all.

Reading Merleau-Ponty ‘Cezanne’s Doubt,’ one gets an impression that doubt is essential to creating a work of art, and not just a work of art in which, incidentally, and we may have to wander a bit, it may be relevant to infuse something known in physics—that any work is an outcome of how a body undergoes a certain form of displacement. The formula here is W= F x d., where W is work, F is force applied, and d. as displacement. We may take ‘art’ of which it is a work as that body displaced from some unlit region of space (or we should mean spatio-temporality, going by the most familiar description) which, in the case of physics, would be the subject of any scientific analysis to pursue whose technicality (for whatever it is worth) we may leave to science for now. For the aesthetic part of the ‘work’ we are tracing here in relation to art whose mere presence is always an evidence of something already displaced to begin with, we may take Merleau-Ponty’s description of this region as that very ‘facticity of the unreflected,”1 or in Husserl, that ‘vague morphological essence’ (described by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus). 2 Or, just as I wish to inflect my own voice, here in this caesura between physics and art, I may have to describe this space, rather ingenuously, as an outlying area of thought where one can perceive, outside the mediating technique of logic, a certain form of poetic conceit, a kind of ab/presencing (the play of absence and presence) if not of the immediate evidence of ‘without light,’ ‘without illumination,’ without the usual comforts of what we may call a ‘home’.

Such home is a place where philosophy settles itself comfortably—in reflective thought. Thought is understood here to be a well-lit space, like a set piece whose assumed totality is underlined by light, color, or the texture of that invisible feeling of being magnified by the aura of the visible, which is now at risk of becoming invisible in light of our present climate crisis—the visibility of the green (understood to be the dominant light property of Nature) threatened by the overcast of the grey (or the revenge of the inhuman, the climate, by any means, which can reduce the visible to the utter chaos of unbecoming, including the subject’s gaze which anytime can be returned to its inhuman origin, to its one true grey ecology). In the case of Cezanne’s technique or non-technique set against the standard of linear perspective, it comes with the task “to modify all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics of a real color.”3

Here, it is important to note the functionality of ‘light’. Cezanne’s doubt about his own work is an important intervention on the function of light which opens up here for a purpose—one has only to associate doubt with the absence of light or certainty, just as when thought faces its own alterity, or the ‘I’ suddenly called to its own vulnerability when the other fixes her gaze on him, or calls out his name, which makes him feel naked for the first time. It is the intention of the Cartesian to prevent such calling out, such noise to infract the self-sheltering silence of solipsism, such chance encounter with the world that doubt is employed to shelter thought from the elements. Doubt guarantees the Cartesian of the movement that he so aspired, the vitality that he truly lacked by mistaking the complex procedure of doubting with the simplicity of having a body to perform a work or a task. But it is here that the first housing or settlement issue finds its most primordial form—the question where reason has to settle. Notice here that reason is that which is without its true home. It must have doubted its own capability to find a home. Reason is homeless by any definition or simply because it resorts to definition that it lacks a proper home. And yet doubt will have to undergo its own displacement from the method of the Cartesian if reason must find a home—one has to give doubt its moment to shine, its own work, its own light without the usual application of force known to it. Just like intelligence which must have a body for it to function, or a continent the cooperation of a cluster of islands, an archipelago, reason will need a force behind it. Throughout known history, we know what obviously comes next—reason will deny the power that had borne it.

From that time on since reason found its home in the comfort of a definition, Man as animal rationale, to what Husserl called the ‘crisis of European sciences,’ reason has to deny its own creative power. It has to deny that very power that could unsettle its home, drag it back to where it used to belong—to the hinterland of thought, to the inhuman dimension, to that dimension of pre-personal, pre-reflective, prescientific ghetto but alive with what Merleau-Ponty would mean by “animistic communions,”4 or Cezanne by his curious displacement of movement onto “frozen objects [hesitating] as at the beginning of the world,”5 even more, where the difficulties of creation are always that of the aliveness of groping for the first word, for language humming, homing, honouring the unsayable, or this nameless art of reason. Reason hates the nameless for it is in it that creation dwells “undivided in several minds,”6 as Merleau-Ponty would care to add, “with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition,”7 like a work of art, like a true democracy. Art is democracy where art is not “becoming a pure consciousness,”8 but rather the real act of transforming the probable (by which modern homes are transformed into utilitarian designs, courtesy of the rational scientific age) to the less probable in which democracy functions best—a free housing settlement. Free settlement is the less probable that has been assigned to the functionality of a utopia.

Cezanne might have doubted this extension of art to the liberation of squatters, gypsies, informal settlers from around the world, even of the homeless in reason, deprived of education, of enhanced perspective, let alone, nutrition. But it is enough that we can learn from his invocation of the less probable, of the impossibility of a “landscape [thinking] itself in [us].” Merleau-Ponty describes ‘depth’ to mean “the most existential dimension,”9 devoid of the illusion of a “linear third dimension,”10 which is exactly what we mean when we extend Cezanne to the schizophrenia of art in the outskirts of the infirmary of reason.

[NB: I’m scheduled to deliver a plenary talk somewhere in Central Philippines in an event organized by the Philosophical Circle of the Philippines. Below is a brief sketch of what’s on my mind or something close to ‘mind’].

This short talk will pay attention to what I think has been thoroughly neglected today, with the contemporary attention otherwise paid to one of the most dominant functions of conception, namely, its reproductive capacity. For purposes of my talk, I will borrow and expand in the course of my discussion key insights from Plato, specifically Timaeus, one of his most controversial dialogues, and from there expand these insights to their postmodern appropriation in the works of Julia Kristeva. The focus will be on Plato’s concept of chora which Kristeva would revisit in his most influential work Revolution in Poetic Language.

As a foretaste of what is to come of this talk, we can say in advance that the chora is controversial for many reasons. For one, it is resistant to any definition, or logical representation. We can also note here that Aristotle, in his critique of Plato’s fascination for the ambiguous, would reduce the indefinability of the chora to a kind of logical presence (logos apophantikos). It would seem that Plato deliberately left the concept of chora to its ambiguous state in opposition to ‘conception’ which Aristotle identified with logical reasoning. This logical reduction of chora to rational conception is not without its connection to the definition of Man as animal rationale.

Our basic contention here is that the definition of Man as animal rationale is a productive concept as opposed to the unproductive concept of Plato’s chora. The difference between the two concepts plays on many levels. For one, Plato’s chora is opposed to reproduction on the simple basis that it is opposed to production. We may also connect this to Plato’s opposition to mimesis or the production of reproduction of what is already a reproduced copy—the copy as always already reproduced by something close to what we can name as reason.

And yet, the origin of reason can be traced ultimately to what is not in the essence of reason. In Plato’s Timaeus, the origin of the cosmos, for instance, is ultimately traced to storytelling rather than to logical deduction. The world, in other words, is created by fabulation, itself a ‘force’ of [or] behind reason, not strictly reason. And as long as it is in the order of storytelling and its persuasiveness, that which originates the world is also resistant to any finality, or final causation which otherwise is the case in a logical conclusion as may be applied to cosmology (which Aristotle did).

Another controversial aspect of the concept of chora, which Kristeva would expand later in her work, is its incestual nature. In John Sallis’s contribution to the elaboration of this Platonic concept, the chora is described as the outcome of “incest between Man and his ever virginal mother.” Its relation to incest is not in any way obscene. Freud would tell us that incest is an anthropological fact of our prehistoric past, which nonetheless continues up to our historical present, albeit, in a displaced or condensed manner. Freud is referring here to the two primary workings of the unconscious (displacement and condensation). In other words, the incestual essence of our past continues to influence our present, not because there are cases of incest in our time, rather because it continues to define us unconsciously. For Kristeva, it influences us within the sphere of existence that may be described as pre-reflective, pre-analytic, pre-propositional, pre-logical, or pre-representational. Kristeva identifies this sphere as the body or the flesh itself as a matrix of uncategorized passions, drives and urges. Incidentally, logic (which qualifies here as the representative of society in the education of the human person) would reduce this erotic dimension to a categorically defined moral or epistemic proposition for socially productive ends.

We may argue here with Kristeva that the persistence of the chora in our body which no logic can totalize amounts to infertility in the sense we may describe of love without reproduction, not in the literal sense of opposing sexual reproduction, let alone, the incapacity to reproduce, but rather in the sense of resisting the reproduction of the social symbolic (an act not restricted to the sexually fertile or infertile) which reproduces the dominant function of conception, namely, the logical fertilization of love. We understand this logical fertilization as the opposite of the imaginative fertilization of love. The imaginative pertains to a kind of fertilization of the body, the care of the flesh, its nourishment, its education outside the bounds of biopolitics, or any form of totalization, be it conservative, reformist, progressive, or revolutionary with the end of making life programmable by representation.

Lastly, we understand the body as every-body which connects Kristeva’s project of the care of the body to the realities of the everyday where everyone is a body. If the body sustains the chora (we can say the body is incurably in love with it) despite the history of the totalization of this ‘bastard concept’ to anything other than a body full of love, we may say in conclusion that we have never been an animal rationale. It suffices to say that we continue to defy the definition in the name of love that remains unnameable.

Unfortunately for professional poets (not just poets in the formal sense of the term), there is a metaphor that remains pre-reflective, pre-analytic, pre-propositional, and that is the metaphor of the everyday. The metaphor that one can readily submit to linguistics is a metaphor of the academic, the researcher, the professional poet whose metaphoric use of the metaphor is the vaporized metaphor of the everyday that has to be reduced first into a vapor for it to become an object of linguistic analysis (which I am not saying should be renamed as a science of vaporizers).

The thickness of the materiality of the metaphor of the everyday will remain the envy of the professional. As honest as a writer like Blanchot would acknowledge that writing itself (presumably, inescapably metaphoric) is just about reporting how a disaster occurs at the moment of writing, or about a certain violence that ‘writing’ does with the everyday.

And to extend Blanchot’s take here quite liberally, writing about metaphor as an object of study mutilates the metaphor of the pre-linguistic (or the pre-scientific vis-à-vis linguistics as science), which makes this analysis responsible for a certain yet unnameable crime. Surprisingly, no single writer or poet (professional I mean) has been jailed for this unspeakable crime against reality, which in fact is the Ur-sprung of all crimes. Surprisingly, we have the Law, which is full of language, intended to punish a crime that traces its roots in language.

This could be the reason why poets are banished in Plato’s Republic. And all that without saying that Plato understood well the consequences of misinterpreting this gesture–ah, the poets in our midst!

To the extent that we cannot know with absolute certainty why evolution happened and continues to happen (a question that also places us in the equation, much along the mystery of the sex divide), to that extent also, albeit, negatively, we can account for how this question of whyness is important to be problematized.

Yet whyness is not a question that we can answer satisfactorily except in a roundabout process of howness (this makes knowledge therapeutic, as Wittgenstein would say), by a process of approximation in which language is an important functionality. Because language can simply loiter around the how of this important questioning it is always doomed to communicate painfully ever more this ‘why’. With this painful process alone, the why question ceases to be expressible in human terms, which by the way also humanizes us in a different way (there will be more poetry as this communication becomes ever more painful, I guess) but better if it is going to be oriented, finally, towards a more fundamental awareness.

It is the awareness that we co-exist as objects with other objects in this marbled planetary parliament of things (now at the receiving end of the last assault of establishment humanism against infertility, against the happy community of cyborgs that do not reproduce the unhappy humanism of capital, of the Law of the Father, those who are irreducible to the definition of animal rationale [those who love for love’s sake?]), not as a subject privileged by language.

I would like to begin here with a quote from one of my favorite aphoristic writers, Emile Cioran, which reads as follows:

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech. 1

Like Franz Kafka who was a stranger to the German language, Cioran was alien to French. Both writers, however, were able to produce masterpieces which arguably ripped apart the languages of their hosts, or so it seems. In truth these languages were only refashioned in the alien cartography of their own style, mapping out those unlit terrains of thought (dianoia) that these languages sealed off for a time from ever reaching the surface, above which hangs what might be the only way into the work of truth. Truth, as Ricoeur puts it, is a certain communicability2 expressed in a manner or style by which something comes alive once again. The German and the French arguably breathed once again in the singular cases of Kafka and Cioran, each “breaking a path in the real.” 3 In Kafka, it was a singular case that summoned a new rule for German writing;4 in the case of Cioran, at least, how a dispossessed Romanian sought refuge in an alien work of truth, in a language that he confessed “is [an antipode] to his nature,” not to mention “[his] true self,”5 but helped it come alive “when [French] was in full decline… [and] the French themselves do not seem to mind.”6

In the idiom of Ricoeur, the singularities of these two great writers of our time attest to the complementarity of question and response,7 altogether thrown in their midst by a crisis.8 In both cases, the element of distance reveals a crisis is on their way, that is, from the very outset as a diasporic encounter. In a strange land they would have to suffer the banality of its speech and into whose syntax they were forced to breathe a new life, a new being; a new soul. But for any nomad, speech is one thing; legwork is another. Nomads are known in prehistory as capable of taking root wherever there is an exit to creation,9 wanderers of uncharted lands, with only the climate to stop them on their tracks, perhaps, a melting glacier, an unexpected tsunami, a volcanic eruption. Sans the threat of climate, nomads were known for assimilating themselves in the speech of their foreign hosts, but also, in due time, transform that speech as their own, thereby a new people is born.

For a nomad, the island is like a poem or narrative that with her power to refigure would metamorphose into something else but not entirely new. It is arguable to consider here the island as a work of art, with nature as architect, demiurge, so to speak. And equally arguable is the thought that a nomad may be the only authentic model of aesthetic experience whose memory has now retreated into the unconscious of modern humanity. But while we are still alive with a new climate tale about to be told in the next few decades, let us hope, with surviving human witnesses, it may still be relevant to look back and rekindle the wonder, the awe that is now becoming extinct in our species. I would like first to quote Ricoeur before I drive home to my point:

Because, in the last analysis, a painter paints to be seen, a musician writes to be heard. Something of her experience, precisely because it has been carried by a work, is going to be able to be communicated. Her naked experience as such was incommunicable; but, as soon as it can be problematized in the form of a singular question which is adequately answered in the form of a response that is singular as well, then it acquires communicability, it becomes universalizable. 10

Who would have ever thought that with his modern sensibility Ricoeur might be referring to a painter who lived and died in a cave, or a nomad whose bones now dwell among the fossils of a bygone age buried deep beneath the soil of France? In one of the greatest discoveries of human culture, a cave in Southern France astonished the world with its primitive gallery of one of the oldest known paintings, about 32,000 years ago, in the history of humankind. (The oldest in record is found in Spain in Cave Altamira which by far revealed more colourful charcoal paintings, though these works were attributed to Neanderthals, not yet human by anthropological standards. We can wonder here if aesthetic experience is still peculiar to humans. Other more recent cave paintings by our human ancestors are found in Argentina).

Another astonishing fact deserves full attention: in the same cave in France, known as the Chauvet Cave, a footprint of an eight-year old child was found; alongside it, a footprint of a wolf.

The cave bears testimony to what is by any measure incommunicable to us in the modern age, and with the child arguably one among the mystery painters, adding onto the strange, aesthetic experience, as this case may attest to, is not a singularity unique to a learned adult, but even to the young and prehistoric at that, not to mention here a life that was at the total mercy of nature. Alongside its anthropological purchase, the cave paintings might have also been inspired, albeit negatively, by the torments of survival and any sign of neurosis may be inferred as purely speculative. (Neurosis would have to be invented by the modern to give expression to a phenomenon unknown in medical science—pity Van Gogh that he had to endure this assault of calculation). But the paintings on the cave walls—what do they communicate to us in the here and now?

It is of interest to note that Picasso who was born in Spain (but fled to France where he died to escape the persecution of Franco) had seen Spain’s Cave Altamira’s paintings. After coming out of the cave, he was reported as saying—“After Altamira, all is decadence.” Altamira’s cave paintings formed a line of genealogical continuum with Chauvet’s and those in Argentina (at least the first two belonged to the Upper Paleolithic Period). What interests us here is that Picasso may be referring to the modern experience of aesthetics that would pale in comparison to the singularity of these prehistoric artists. Living in unimaginably harsh conditions, these artists produced works of art that would make Adorno envious, real exemplars of artistic autonomy, its distance from the real without the necessity to indulge in hibernatory aesthetics peculiar to late modernity.11

In the essay by Roger Savage, there is a critical mention of hibernatory refuge linking the negative dialectics of Adorno and Horkheimer to a kind of aesthetic experience whose distance from the real identifies, albeit paradoxically, a likely source of human emancipation.12 This so-called aesthetic distance reveals the autonomous essence of art vis-à-vis the world that is not destined for art, so to speak: “What is true in art is something nonexistent.”13 It goes to say that the world cannot tolerate the non-existent; hence, art stands in ceaseless contradiction with it, with no end in sight. Ricoeur, for his part, recovers something which Adorno buried under the shifting sands of modernity. As Savage puts it, “the retreat from the real … is the condition of a work’s power to refigure the practical field of [experience].”14 This leads me back to the cave painting which is made possible by a retreat from the real, from the rising sea level, from the tyranny of the elements.

The cave painting of a prehistoric people, unlike the negative dialectics of Adorno and Horkheimer, exemplified the world through art in order to make it liveable, instead of refracting the real in a hibernatory refuge in the darkness of an age. It is an inversion of referent, 15 in Ricoeur’s idiom, from the incommunicability of the temporal horizon of the cave painting, or rather, the inexpressible of the lived-experience of the [cave] artist,16 to the communicable singularity of survival, of a new consciousness of earth and ocean; likewise, a new myth of creation.17

One of the many sketches of the Minotaur by Picasso, arguably inspired by the bull paintings in Altamira

Make no mistake—the cave is no longer a habitat for us. But the singularity of the cave painting should live among us if only to rekindle the wonder and awe of a prehistoric people who knew ahead of us that distance from the real is not an end in itself. The exemplarity of the cave painting in many ways “makes a claim upon us in demanding a response.”18

To conclude with Savage, the claim if any of the Chauvet cave “lies at the heart of the truth of the work. The claim that a work makes opens us to the world anew.”19

And to this, I should add, in the midst of a real threat to our survival, in the advent of a new cycle of extinction,20 from whose claim upon us we cannot any longer afford to retreat.

It may be that its inspiration is the wildness it covets; the nonconcept that pre-veils the unveiling of poets—those veiled to a fault; the rubble which sees its own disappearance in modern architecture; the weeds—the entire earth that language must first create.

Mga Damong Ligaw is arguably a testament to this silent war on space, yet attests only to what it can see. It sees only what the brave have dared to step onto. Those whose names we barely remember.

Ecology without nature is a concept that takes nature as dangerous.[2] The danger always goes to the agency that names. Before there were ever names, language “drains away into the impermanent.”[3]

As a testament to the unveiled, Oca Villamiel through his art installation mimics an idiolect unbeknownst to speech such that only with a creolized passage, a passage to speech like art, that a writer may approach what it longs to communicate. Like a writer setting out on an “idiolect … unattested anywhere else in antiquity,”[1] forcing speech to let a thousand memories set in, an artwork must compel a canvas—in the case of Villamiel’s ouvre, a rented space—to accommodate the last few days of God’s creation. But for entities like weeds, what days were there to remember? It is always the case that a creation like a work of art can only get a glimpse of what brings to it a feel for everything it lost. In this sense, every work of art stands in close proximity to extinction.

Mga Damong Ligaw may yet be its perfect witness—how naming reveals the extent to which, by setting out to claim something, desire claims the earth. In the history of names, it is always the earth. Language has always been the enemy of the planet, in itself a world-without-us, before there was ever an earth, “impersonal and anonymous.”[4]

But what is language to the planet? Responding to indifference, desire may still get its revenge with toxicity, rivalling the signature of the ancients with only four to look for in the table of elements: air, water, earth, fire. Toxicity, the rightful fifth and legitimately human, the signature of its proud revenge, wants the entire table condensed into its signature. But ‘what is that to Nature?[5]

What is at issue is actually not a … property of nature but the very nature of nature. The sense in which this discontinuity is an ‘essential’ one is not that nature has a fixed essence, but that nature’s lack of a fixed essence is essential to what it is.[6]

It may be the destiny of art to mimic nature but only what is discontinuous to it, what it should lose in exchange for an idiolect, perhaps, an image as in a painting. A logos for Ereignis, being for Other, a horn for a weed, a carabao for a glimpse of an inner workshop, its lack of fixed grounding on words that it must decide to navigate what lies outside the frontier. It may be the painter’s canvass, or a rented space for a miniature landscape; words draining away into the impermanent.

And yet it faces him, the artist for what he has done. He will want to have an audience if only to deflect this look in the eye, to distribute his sin. In the same manner his audience will look for his unattested ambiguity, where words are redirected to either a canvas or landscape, thereby hangs a second tale—a community of sinners participating in the virility of sin.

Even so, Mga Damong Ligaw is without the marriage of art and human purpose, without the jointure of animal to Man, without the intimacy of being to time for it seeks out what no reservedness can relive, what no being-in-the-world can dwell. It appeals to a world in ruins, if not already beyond repair. This time no more demand to alter Man from animal rationale, the cogitating kind, to the inquiring type[7] as it calls up the birth of the avenger for the uncanny, an artificial intelligence—things growing out of their own without human intervention, if not beyond any purpose that the quiet power of the possible may still convey. This is a true parliament of things.[8]

It allows us to imagine a world without us; the apocalypse, the unattested idiolect of our time.

[3] Martin Heidegger, On the Grammar and the Etymology of the Word Being,” in Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 68.

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.

If to guess is to see, then I can only guess what the poem means.

Let us see.

Here comes a poem starting to remember itself, which, as will be in the end, has to be witnessed by god, or so it seems.

But the end of the poem may also be its beginning, or rather, the poem can navigate these temporal boundaries that no human has ever approached without losing herself in the process. Either frontier can promise pure memory where forgetting never gets a chance–but what is then to remember?

What is that to the void, deep beyond the frontier, from which nothing escapes? It is a dare that no one can make, nor even unmake for then it would take as a fact that the poem must be entirely complete in the beginning. But there would be no poem. There wouldn’t be you and me.

Precisely for its non-human nature the poem is transversal: it is becoming-end and becoming-origin at the same time—only a poem gets closer to time like this, without dissolving itself in either of the two, without becoming-time, without becoming its slave. Tell me now if it doesn’t sound magical. Only a magic can escape the bounds of time.

Or so, we can wonder from here, should it sound like magic, the poem whose unbecoming-time within time stays afloat in the river of memories where no memory ever gets the chance to sink deep in the riverbed? Or, should it taste like magic? Which one to go with? Ear, tongue, and the proverbial seeing of poetry: “To look in the eye” in which “the Same is the eye and the eye—the matrix of speculation” (from a Non-philosopher). It is going to be a choice between the tongue and the eye, between the lips and the retina; between accommodation and seeing from a distance; between making love which gathers the senses into one bastard copula and a soft allusion to the act of pornography, ah! between ‘you and me shortening the distance’ and ‘you and me separated by an abyss’.

But I have spoken so much already. I have to mention the bride which appeared towards the poem’s end which may promptly suggest a scene from a wedding ceremony; imagine here a bride snatched away from that scene, wherever it might be; or perhaps, not a ceremony at all, this spares us the trouble of going from one place to another, for we can only see an image of a bride. All the resources of the poem were spent entirely for this bride, and what an effort!

But what of the image for which a poem surrenders its secret, its voice, its most prized asset?

The bride’s image stands here for what it is now, a photo, a word processed in speech lab, a word processor, a word for the ‘here and now.’ And to complete an ecology of the image, a still image as in a photo, a foreground must also be seen, along with the figure (the bride) and the background (the magicality that started it all like the instantaneity of the shutter that makes time stand still).

Need we say for now only a god can make time stand still? Only a god can remember? Only a god can make a poem? A non-human seizing a tiny universe from a much larger one; condensing into hallelujah, or whatever sound may seem pertinent to an instance of joyful bliss, approaching saintliness?

And then, god can smile. I see him smile. I, who is not looking.

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History Walter Benjamin made use of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus or ‘Angel of History’ to present a rather uncanny image of hope blocking the tide of progress blowing from Paradise. Who might be this helpless angel suspended in mid-air, flapping its wings in their full length with all its might, is still a mystery. What is more surprising is that this angel is facing paradise as its back faces the future. Take note it’s a painting and the angel is facing us. And the future—the wall which we are about to hit as we continue to embrace progress.

As we welcome the New Year perhaps it might be time to reflect where we should be standing opposite the angel. I would like to great everyone then a happy new year if only to express hope that we are not about to hit the wall sooner than we can expect. Happy New Year!

We are supposed to be inside a speeding train, the train being capitalism accelerating as ever. If there is supposed to be no outside to capitalism, then we are all by necessity aboard the machine of capital. It is easy to imagine here that labor is placed inside this speeding machine. Labor, as Marx once emphasized, is the actual figure of freedom whose purpose is to free itself from necessity (capital being the actual figure of the latter). And yet, it is also easy to agree that labor has never been successful in reversing the order; it has always been capital determining it. In a rather odd complement, for the scientific socialist that was Marx, the whole idea of communism in which labor wins the battle against capital would have to remain as such, an idea. And here, philosophy has always been our constant companion.

Meanwhile, the Accelerationist Manifesto would have us acknowledge that labor and capital have always been complementing one another, provided that we can see through the inner workings of history. There must be a singular approach here which is quite familiar. If history would be our guide, the approach is to assume the position of capital which has been representing history as far as it can be conceived. One has to have a comprehensive scan of what’s going on, which can only be a view from above. By analogy, one must assume the putative ‘function’ of the brain. Localism would be the equivalent of organs or bodies which have disjunctive relations to intelligence. Organs or bodies can only produce, but not create. Creation must have a preconception of boundaries. Production is quite different—it knows no limit. It may just be the thing that’s really accelerating without end. By a familiar metaphysical route, acceleration would have us recognize the primacy of creation over production, to regularize production which seems to be the one that is more prone to excess.

What we may not be allowed to suspect is that human acceleration prefers a cognitive approach to emancipation, which brings us back to philosophy, our constant companion with respect to speculating about possibilities for production to overturn creation (perhaps, one reason philosophy is always attracted to atheism), bodies claiming the place of intelligence. But one can always find in philosophy a nagging asymmetry between thinking and bodies, conception and production, etc, which makes this constant companion of ours the most misunderstood knowledge form. And it sure has its own share of blame. Philosophy never seems to have learned from its own confusion by appealing to production which, though limitless, is limitless rather within the present. By taking production (actuality) out of time (into the future, into possibility), philosophy deprives productive bodies of their temporal life, hence, skinning these bodies alive until nothing but its ideal form (the thought that counts for a revolutionary) remains. A philosopher is thus a revolutionary in this sense.

But today philosophy would like us to acknowledge its new name, acceleration, which may mean the fastest way to take production out of time at the same time that the possibilities for production to overturn creation are repurposed to make these possibilities realizable within the present. In acceleration, we may mistake philosophy to have learned its lesson alas. Marx was actually the first one to proclaim philosophy’s poverty by advocating for a proto-acceleration of the means of production to draw capitalism to its logical conclusion, so the Accelerationist Manifesto says. For Marx, philosophy was no solution; possibility must be tamed by the actual, production by creation, limitlessness by design. Marx relied on the working class—bodies of production—to realize this conclusion without having to turn bodies into brains, or workers into capitalists. Workers are entrusted with the historical mission to finish the design of capital by dissolving itself in labor, arguably the real capital. If production did not accelerate in Marx’s time, today, however, we have reasons to believe, so we are told, that it is accelerating, and yet, like a body it is proceeding without design, regularity and discipline. One must be ready to accept the new challenge here, which is to imagine, in the most radical way possible, how production can cease to function as bodies, how it can create itself according to design, planning and purposefulness.

Capitalism has actually done us a favor by cognitivizing production, so we need not imagine that much really. Our new task is to radicalize this cognitive direction to a position in which production becomes intelligent design. In this radical mode of imagination, production fuses with creation. It is philosophy coalescing with production by regressing to the present to repurpose its design. The key for a renewed philosophy though is to realize bodies outside of the design of capital which is not accelerating on behalf of bodies, rather on behalf of creation without bodies. Going back to acceleration, one has to imagine that bodies are the ones steering the speeding train, giving the value added impression that bodies are responsible for the speed as well as the upkeep of the train as it accelerates.

They in fact do except that these bodies do not realize, as the new Accelerationism proponents believe, that they are already creating the Outside to capital. They are unaware that they are philosophers. But let us remind ourselves here that once the Outside had been the privileged object of analysis of philosophy until capital stole that object, becoming philosophy itself. Capital is now turning the dream of production and limitlessness into creation as mastery of the Outside, the future. If Marx was a proponent of acceleration, as the manifesto would have us acknowledge, it is to his credit that philosophy must be abandoned, if the goal is to construct the future that capitalism has already foreclosed, in favor of real concrete actions. In an unlikely twist, Marx and capitalism can both sing and dance to the tune of, most familiar to Marxists though, the poverty of philosophy. Its poverty lies in the fact that it does not want to regress, which bespeaks of its hubris, its illusion of being progressive, revolutionary, and axiomatic. What this goes down to in the last instance is that Marx knew there is no alternative to capitalism. Philosophy would never allow itself to regress to the present to change the order of things. But if capitalism can do philosophy, philosophy can become richer by all of history’s combined wealth. And indeed, it is to Marx’s credit that philosophical capitalism will be compelled to accelerate, hence, the emancipation of bodies from their lack of purpose.

Real concrete actions may thus mean changing the way philosophy has been hitherto done. This is perhaps the original contribution of the Accelerationist Manifesto. Following Marx through its timely intervention in contemporary left politics, we can now say that the object of change is not the world vis-à-vis the many interpretations that have been made about its ontological status. Rather, it is how we can do philosophy this time (through a radical unity with bodies, or rather, production, by means of which philosophy regresses to the present which it has until now consistently avoided with its characteristic obsession with possibilities, with option contracts, least to say, under the general rubric of speculative future) which must first presuppose that the world, nonetheless, must not change, if only for philosophical creation, regressing to the present from out of the future, to catch up with the world, that is to say, the actual. Apropos of the famous last thesis of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, our attention draws closer to its secret: Philosophy must either imitate capitalism or become capitalism itself.

In this new light, and arguably so, labor can be emancipated. It can free itself from the illusion of the future—hope, in simple terms—for the future, once a possibility, has reached a dead-end, which is its own actuality, namely, the accelerating present. This, of course, will be made possible by philosophy abandoning the future, the Outside in favor of the pragmatic concerns of the revolution. If this is what Marx meant by the poverty of philosophy, Marxists should take the gesture at its most instructive, namely, and rightly so, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

NB: See Joseph Weissmann on his unique take on accelerationism, certainly a critical contribution to the topic, though different from ours:

In a recent talk Timothy Morton (1) argues that Nature is a dangerous concept. From what I have gathered in his lecture, nonetheless, Nature is dangerous in its conceptual appeal to the universal which totalizes and is therefore reductive. Many would settle at least in an aesthetic intuition of Nature that seemingly avoids the totalizing direction of universalization as it comfortably settles in the particular, like a coral; least to say, in a quantic indetermination of bodies of Nature (I mean bodies in the sense of a disjunctive relation to a whole as an administrable assemblage). Nature is anthropocentric—I have no objection to this—and yet, when aesthetic is invoked to appeal to Nature as quantic indetermination, seemingly to escape the subjective or sovereign standpoint, we may lose sight of the fact that aesthetic remains a kind of intellectual intuition.

Intellectual intuition is a property of the subject, regardless whether it is questionable these days to appeal to a notion of sovereignty. Property does not equal to sovereignty. And yet when something such an inventory of reason (which Kant did) situates intellectual intuition within the history of the systems of thought in which aesthetics becomes a part of the narrative of how reason achieves a critical relation to itself intellectual intuition is made to serve something greater than itself, such as being productive of a prioris of time and space which alone could initiate a world-ing of world, which would then culminate in the anthropocentrism of the world-order, a highly probable cause of climate change, so we are told. But before this crisis, anthropocentrism has given us wars, economic exploitation, gender abuse, imperialism, etc. The list could go on. We can assume here that part of this familiar narrative of anthropocentrism and its crises is the plasticity of aesthetics (to use Malabou’s concept) made to serve something larger than intuitivity, that is, productivity (this time, Malabou’s plasticity falls short of its promise—insofar as every object is exchangeable for something, noting its lack of ontological ground, what could also be its lack of interest in itself, its readiness for co-optation, say with a dominant or sovereign ecology, is not unlikely).

So how are we to make sense of aesthetics, say, as first philosophy which, as in Harman’s position, must be thought outside of the dominance of subject orientation? Perhaps, we can reformulate the question into ‘how can we make sense of aesthetics as first philosophy without falling back on the inventory of reason that has been going on since Kant?’ Or, perhaps, Laruelle is right that philosophy has yet to realize that its business depends on endless criticism, or a critical inventory of the claims of reason.

Is there a way of doing aesthetics without treating it the way it has been hitherto treated, that is, as an inventoried passage of reason from pre-critical to its critical phase? Didn’t Nietzsche affirm otherwise the importance of tragic consciousness as an aesthetic contemplation but not as an inventoried category of reason, rather as an affirmation of life that will always return to itself?

And yet, we can also treat the problem as historical. Aesthetics may be rethought outside of the critical inventory of reason assuming we can hold a place outside of history within which alone aesthetics may be thought. Outside of history, we may assume aesthetics can be thought outside of reason. If reason claims total determination, then a kind of indetermination may offer an opportunity for rethinking aesthetics, assuming it is worth the while to rethink it. We believe it is. Here, ‘outside of history’ may mean the challenge of indetermination (we always devalue history in our own capacity as individuals) or the challenge of absolute negation. Nietzsche may not be ready for the latter, assuming we are correct in arguing that, although it is debatable that he harbors a position in favor of vitalism he at least is not open to the possibility of the extinction of history where life can no longer return its affirmative neutrality to the existence of the historical species, that is, what has become of us. We are speaking here of actual extinction of the species.

We cannot however agree with Derrida that it is death that always interrupts this return of life to itself. Where death is said to always interrupt, what returns is no longer life but something artificial, say, the signature of the author or his or her name. Derrida’s modus operandi is to historicize death (which is deconstructive enough) in order to interrupt life as bios (2) but where death is understood as the subject (who, as dead, returns, not life), Derrida affirms the subject in its dissimulated affirmation of life (that returns). Life is the undeclared model of the subject who returns. And yet, the subject is the rival of life. Even so, Derrida is not doing aesthetics outside of history. Without belaboring the point, he is deconstructing history, or rather, a progressive, more advanced form of the critical inventory of reason.

Lastly, we may ask: is thinking extinction the right way to do aesthetics outside of history? If history should go extinct, are we not speaking of the extinction of reason, of conception that makes history possible, in favor of the return to the unhistorical, the uncanny (perhaps, the third kind vis-à-vis the binary opposition of being and becoming in Plato’s Timaeus, known as chora), the avenger for what historical reason has repressed? Or, a return to myth (as in Deleuze), a second creation (as in Nietzsche, the rebirth of tragedy), a new humanity? It well to note here that Deleuze also thinks of second creation as a likely result of the “general distribution of continents, the states of the sea, and lines of navigation.” (3) Not far from an ecological apocalypse.

In the old days people must have observed Christmas as a time for gathering strength, mind and will to face the coming of the unknown, much of it were caused by erratic days of the year drawing to a close, with only the regularity of life, provided by uncountable traces upon which to depend their next steps for tomorrow, giving them the comfort of the uncanny, even so, a comfort to begin with.

With the invention of the new calendar we were offered presumably complete days and nights, with a room for leap years to accommodate what still need to be accounted for, affording chance its moment to shine but shine it does as it can be thought in advance; cycles of birth, and death, and perhaps rebirth, yet much still would leave us with the feeling of being surrounded by a gaping void (to borrow from Nietzsche).

Never therefore has the unpredictable become the real feeling of what is to come with the uncanny guarantee of calculable days and nights, of the regularity of time and familiarity of space, not to mention Christmas that is about to come to pass, few hours from now.

It may be well in this light that perhaps we need to regain the old consciousness of what is to come, unbounded by external principle, the objective measure of time, in the face of the unknown. Perhaps, this could bind us as one in a world that has never been our true home with all its false guarantees of happiness, and human desire rather chased by a measurable object of craving where desire ceased to be what it used to be, arousing noble passions, and more intensely, love that creates all.

And so when people say ‘happy Christmas!’ they say this in the hope that something in this world, notwithstanding, would beckon a new beginning, a new promise that this world would one day become us, no more as that from which we are alienated and estranged, or from which our desires our stolen in favor of the world where we can never fit in. But fit we do, not to mention, in the face of the impossible, through friendship and a shared feeling of vulnerability, by all means love like life, more actual than civility, more real than all the ways of the known world combined; more mysterious than death.

Happy Christmas then!

NB: See http://persistentenlightenment.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/christmas-truce/ for a critical take on the famous ‘Christmas truce’ if not for a bit of Walter Benjamin: “The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption.”

While I can agree with Zizek that love is an encounter and that we rarely encounter the encounter in contemporary life—which makes the present devoid of encounters despite the modern architecture, spaces and structures, or communicative tech apps built and designed to accommodate the meeting of bodies, virtual or real, not to mention an increasingly overcrowding world—what I find in his proposition with Kafka, that love is an event, is shy of proposing that Latour is right, that we have never been modern, a familiar claim with which nonetheless I cannot entirely agree.

Apropos this proposition of Latour, Zizek would give it the usual psychoanalytic twist: we have always been modern, we’re just not aware of it. We have always been in love, yet unaware of it most of the time. How unaware we all are of the encounter that is the event is written in the very heart of the urban world: bars, cafes, restaurants, chat rooms, busy streets, malls, motels, parks, even universities, and any place where architecture, including designs of mobile communication spaces, conspire to keep bodies at their unknowing conditions of metastability. All these at the same time that bodies are moved, giving the illusion of free mobility, or dragged along pre-arranged spaces where even unanticipated encounters are already designed in advance. The rule is to provoke complexity in encounters, modeled on the dynamics of desire, where complexity drives innovation. No doubt, the rural is also increasingly invaded by the landscaping sensibility of modernity, on the assumption that its dullness and pastoral sickliness are indifferent to encounters—it lacks mobility and so, it would follow the excitation of desire.

One simply has to extract the event from the swirling vortices of these unwitting encounters by a process of critical retrospection, or rather, a retrieval of the encounter with the “oh my God” feeling of the event. One has to fall, as Zizek argues, to encounter the encounter, to fall in love, to fall in the encounter, to fall the fall. To fall is to arrest the movement already giving us the experience of vertigo yet not so much as to give us the proper dose to rebel against the city, against the modern urban spirit of architecture and spatial planning which runs deep into the subterranean logic of capital accumulation. And why would we rebel if the city affords us the chance of the encounter, the chance of love, of getting into the mix, of the experience of the “oh my God, I was waiting all my life for you.”

We may wonder here how much would be lost if we reduce the urban spirit to a minimum level of excitation, to tweak its noise, its turmoil and agitation to a level approaching the loveless condition of human existence, the not-granting of the encounter or the event (in Heideggerese). Zizek might have anticipated the question already when he opined that love has become rare these days—not any other day but these days—in the midst of the aggressive transformation of the urban world. And yet, it is not difficult to see where Zizek’s valorisation of encounters would lead against the background of lovelessness. The excitation of the urban world, notwithstanding, is a rich potential for the event where bodies have the high probability to fall into the happenstance of their lifetime. We need to sustain the urban world with as much encounters as we can fall into, with as much metastability as we can accomplish to accelerate the frequency of the event. Though he might not like the thought that he is an accelerationist of the encounter that we all need for enriching the human condition threatened by lovelessness, Zizek’s concept of love would lose its appeal if we won’t do our part, that is, to hasten the event, thus, to accommodate further doses of complexity.

The key to unpack Zizek’s enigmatic proposition of the encounter is to see through his ongoing defense of the foremost ideal of modernity; in a nutshell, the ideal of falling in love. Let us not lose sight of the fact that this ideal is achievable in the urban world, at least, for him, the cosmopolitan that he is. And there is only one cosmopolis—the West.

And so Zizek would have us absorb the fact that encounters are pre-arranged in the pre-modern. I am not sure whether Zizek had an overdose of encounters that makes him careless, but he simply bungled historical details. I need not look far. In my own local (Philippine) history, polygamy was a custom in pre-colonial times and, if recent studies are indications of successful upstaging of Western models, was put into practice like all of the East Dionysian communities so dear to Nietzsche, which is not a stranger to love, and indeed not any less to a naive ethicality of sexual difference, which does not mean that they were better than the modern. All these were destroyed by Spanish missionaries at the behest of the Atlantic war machine, warning the natives of damnation that awaited them, the lust-driven, promiscuous, polymorphous perverts that they were. Homosexuality was also recognized as observed by these missionaries writing in their diaries about the custom of cross dressing among the natives. I wonder whether Zizek would dismiss these by underscoring the undesirability of pre-arranged marriages of the pre-modern which no doubt there were, but the modern is certainly not the end of pre-arranged encounters. So the question would be, why assign the wider ramification of the unethicality of pre-arranged encounter, lovelessness, to the pre-modern?

The Western ideologist that he is, Zizek is a total stranger to this history. As he argues so well on Kafka with regard to his influence as a writer—that the writer, invoking Borges this time, has to invent his past, and so the figures that influenced him—Zizek had to force into existence his ‘pre-modern’ condition of Western modernity. Apropos of those pre-arranged encounters that he picked up as an object of criticism—where else is the encounter not pre-arranged by urban spatial constellation? Zizek is idealizing the hyper-modernity of the West by insisting upon the possibility of a chance encounter which is love amidst the spinning landscape of the modern urban spatiality. It is only in hyper-modernity where Zizek’s concept of love can happen. And it is precisely when hyper-modernity is falling out of encounters, the near mass extinction of encounters, or rather, the extinction of desire, that the encounter must be teased out of its unconscious.

Perhaps, that will be Kafka’s last love, his last opportunity to fall the fall, his one true, albeit, brief encounter.

NB: For the video lecture of Zizek on Kafka see Nicholas of installingorder.org at http://installingorder.org/2014/12/12/slavoj-zizek-on-kafka-and-love/

The chief problem of reducing Plato to an idealist is the assumption rarely interrogated that Plato is Platonism. History should be our guide. Platonism is not Plato.

The point of the reductive function of any ‘ism’ is to forge an axiomatic memory as against what preceded it—axioms being the destroyer of non-sense, of indefinability and the dark precursor out of which the present emerged. By all means, the present is the founding temporal locus of organization, or rather, a decisionistic displacement of the past onto a memory bank forged in the now. This officially becomes Platonism when, at some point after Plato, philosophy declares (the pronouncement is more evident in Heidegger) that truth cannot be had by fabulation, by storytelling (which in fact Plato did in his theory of recollection) in terms of “defining entities as entities by tracing them back in their origin to some other entities” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 26).

The Phaedo is a case in point when Socrates talked about the origin of everything, by tracing something to another, until the story reached its culmination in death—the origin of everything. But death is not physical death; rather it is traced to an indefinable past that memory attempts to penetrate, not without the difficulties it has to bear. But the difficulty is there to keep thinking alive, to keep it away from the reductive machination of definition, finality and organization. Recollection has the sole function in Plato to sustain something irreducible; something that would linger even after the most systematic reduction of calculative thinking is done with the most sinister intent, beginning with Aristotle. In most recent forays into this irreducible, isn’t Laruelle rehearsing Plato in his concept of Man-in-man in which “Man” (in the Man-in-man) is the irreducible in the reduction of man to animal rationale? The Man-in-man is Laruelle’s generic definition in place of Aristotle’s animal rationale in which arguably man becomes human under the protection of logos apophantikos. Plato is entirely different. The logos is not to be reached by reason alone, but also by the good beyond being, which already offers us an alternative to reason, namely, fabulation. Aristotle rejected fabulation and recollection in favor of reducing the uneasiness of imagination to the categories of reason. This is the start of Platonism proper—the reduction of Plato’s intoxicating irreductions.

In short, the greatest legacy of Platonism is the refusal of storytelling. This is strictly played out in Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s Timaeus in Physics in which Aristotle rejected the former’s concept of the chora, or the third kind that actually preconditions the possibility of being and becoming out of which the physical world emerges; the chora as the errant causality, totally indefinable, something that must be left outside of the bounds of known and intelligible sense. We must not lose sight of Plato’s point that the chora as an errant cause is the whole essence of necessity itself, namely, pace Meillassoux, contingency. Here, contingency is the avenger for the irreducible. In the Timaeus, the cosmos is created by fabulation which the chora demands as no reason can account for it. As characteristic of recollection, fabulation qualifies as the condition of possibility of creation.

So what is Platonism? Our brief answer is: It is the being of us as animal rationale that demands we must secure ourselves against the temptation to indulge in chorology. But isn’t chorology the power of the false?

“Reading the Ethics is supposed to persuade us to change in some way. We are supposed to do things differently than we did before (in particular, we’re supposed to occupy ourselves with organizing joyous encounters and with escape ideas born of the imaginary)” (Larval Subjects)

How To Throw a Principle Away

This is one paradox, the most representative I guess, in Spinoza’s system which can be resolved, without reducing his system to what we believe it actually does, by observing his system from a meta-theoretical standpoint which will need us to utilize, vis-à-vis the Ethics, a meta-ethical frame of analysis. And by that I mean bringing the Ethics into contact with individual experiences, ours I mean, which are multiply framed, most I guess do not enjoy the comfort of taking Spinoza’s concepts in mind.

Or, none of these experiences actually does. Still Spinoza’s system, regardless of its internal inconsistency vis-à-vis his over-all deterministic disposition, is a system that demands a correspondence with experiences, regardless of situations which give birth to them or bring them into light, which is what it does if we agree that Spinoza’s Ethics is a system in itself. Or, we can throw this view away if we come to an agreement that, for all its intents and purposes, Spinoza’s is not a system by any means.

Incidentally, inspite of my own issues with Kant, I take it that Kant to a great extent managed to solve a similar dilemma concerning the antinomies of reason, which were carefully resolved by objectively extending the aprioris to speculations about objects of experiences and by this Kant meant that pure reason had to annul itself. Only when it annuls itself that pure reason can extend itself to objects of experiences (previously inaccessible to pure reason). It goes without saying that in its pre-critical period, pure reason was busy the whole time dogmatically reproducing the principle of determinism, that is to say, extending itself without annulling itself at the same time. Taking Kant into mind, Spinoza’s Ethics is made possible by annulling this principle, that is to say, to give room for practical reason, the sphere in which freedom can make sense, or throwing it away as it turned out to be incompatible with freedom. At least, Spinoza had to suspend its efficacy vis-à-vis the aim of sustaining freedom. The sphere of practical reason is the ethical itself, needless to say. The question that confronts us now is whether Spinoza’s Ethics is actually suspending the principle of determinism.

Take note that in Kant the annulment of pure reason is not absolute. After all we are talking about ‘one cognition’, reason which is both capable of speculation and performance, pure reason and practical reason, etc. This is known as Kant’s concept of reflexivity in which reason interrogates its own assumptions. Reason is therefore doing a critical work, that is, upon itself. My own debate with Kant has something to do with the history of nihilism of which Kant was only partially aware, which makes his so-called inventory of the aprioris of reason (for classifying which ones are speculative, and which ones are practical) incomplete and therefore incapable of dealing with nihilism whose full complement was about to be witnessed by Nietzsche. This is not to say that Nietzsche completed the table of categories. Far from it. Nietzsche shifted the terrain somewhere else. But exactly, the same form of nihilism would confound Spinoza, although it was restricted to the burning issues of his day—does God still matter in the realm of freedom? Here, Spinoza is actually trying to salvage determinism in order to save the value of freedom. Freedom had to be rescued from determinism so that the latter can be saved. But how?

We need not look far. In Spinoza, God assumed the function of Reason. But he lacked the Kantian magic to parcel out reason according to its speculative and performative categories. What Spinoza missed is when to throw a principle (determinism) away. But he did actually do this except that the principle kept coming back that he had to suppress it by axiomatizing the ethical, proofing it against the contamination of the external principle whose arguable strength is that it is a decided mystery—there is God. But another principle takes the place of the one thrown away. Freedom kept coming back which could not under all circumstances assume the function of that which is tossed away. Nostalgia crept in, welcoming the first principle anew. But this time determinism has to be compatible with freedom. Whether Spinoza is prepared to embrace an atheist God is another matter. It looks as though he is.

In Kant, God is reduced to practical reason, to the ethical, a marked contrast with Spinoza where God is extended to the ethical without telling us that pure reason is already extending itself, and is doing so, from the point of view of Kant, dogmatically. It should be the reverse, the ethical, now a pure rational practical faith, extending itself to the speculative that allows itself to think of God, or that which has to be discovered here as though it is for the very first time.

As usual, it goes with the noise carrying the sweat of a crowd too impossible to mistake for angels in a cemetery, the crispness of idle talk which needs this space to become more than what they are, entrapped in the incalculable.

But where it palpitates, there it has never seen action, the onrush of time into space.

Hasn’t anyone heard of it yet? Not long ago ‘Death is beyond experience.’ A false limit whose empty lines spoke only of its quiet power, of the possible being a limit only to calculability.

But where the dead are and where no one else is, curiously said this even goes to them, alive in the stillness of nowhere, calculability gives time its unmistakable context.

Yet the story went on, defying the dead in their own in-crowding, beehive-ing suspicion.

Time is incalculable.

We are all entrapped in it, each for a living soul, the dead takes a life in living memory:

in space, a tomb, in the air, all the same enclosed in a topology—

where time’s the reckoning frame, the dead falls into place.

Night watchers can look up in the sky as children read a few lines from Heidegger. It will be the same stillness.

We take it that ‘posthumanism’ has become a needless rhetorical exercise despite tons of works dedicated to its elaboration and presumably its emancipatory potential vis-à-vis the most persistent threat of the day, techno-determinism. [1] That its persistence is arguably self-reflexive in the sense that it is self-correcting is a sign that it is on to something.

The notion of self has to be implicated here, regardless whether the posthuman is already aggressively disabusing self-reflexivity of its unmistakable Kantian schemata, allegedly because there is no more self to begin with, an outcome of overcoming the self which otherwise played a crucial role in Kant’s system. Arguably, the posthuman advocates a notion of non-self (Bataille comes to mind) whose very act of self-transgression may lead to a relative perfection of knowledge into non-knowledge [2]. But where this relative perfection gives us a glimpse of the post-human, the human as a strict correlate of knowledge, what matters (or what can lay claim to correctness as far as Nietzsche is concerned) is how the attempt to overcome the ‘human’ satisfies at least the minimum requirement of transvaluation. Whether transvaluation gestures a direction towards the ‘posthuman’ is a matter in need of clarification, at least in Nietzsche’s terms.

Nietzsche’s over-all pronouncement in Genealogy, lest we forget, the focal point of the critique of the human, is at least obvious to Deleuze who understood his pronouncements as otherwise urgent, the urgency to raise the question of ‘who will undertake the critique of values’. [3] It would turn out that the question is really about pursuing a critique of the critic himself who turned out to be the ascetic—Nietzsche’s concept of overcoming is after all directed at the ascetic [4] that Kant valorised in all his Critiques. The ascetic is charged by Kant with the responsibility to critique the values of the past as they contaminate and underpin the present. The ascetic as critic is the faciality of Kant’s practical reason which is no longer that of the typical human if we can still think of the human as having all the healthy attributes in the wake of the death of God which Kant was also secretly trying to overcome (whose fulfillment, however, would need Nietzsche to explode like one of those machines [5]).

But the ascetic is the exhausted [6] face of pure reason, bound to the moral exhortation to save at least the minimum of the human, to save the will itself, as Nietzsche puts it, struggling in the midst of the ruins of the old world. The ascetic is encouraged by the Critiques to still entertain the objective illusion that he is still a subject by any means, and therefore a subject capable of undertaking a critique of how the subject itself has been obscured, displaced or sublated as a precondition for understanding the problem of metaphysics, the progenitor of past values or those which gave us the ruins in their unimaginable proportion (offering us more wars, hunger, famine, ecological disasters, etc.).But this is not only the way past values are wreaking havoc as they are also aggressively laying out the landscapes of the future imaginary which Kant would be happy to re-imagine by means of practical reason.

In other words, Kant resurrected the subject in the person of the ascetic. It is well to note here that the humanism of Kant (which acquires its post-Kantian sense in terms of the asceticism of philosophy) is the correct target of Nietzsche’s overcoming in light of the Kantian imaginary of the kingdom of ends. What underlies this kingdom is the discreet but powerful premise that humans are somehow capable of immortality if only that they could utilize to its moral perfectibility the exhortations of practical reason. Here, Kant has abandoned pure (speculative) reason in favor of practical (moral) reason which alone can figure out a way out of the antinomies of reason (such as played out in either science or philosophy) without incurring self-contradiction, that is to say, to simply exist without the comfort of speculation, or the extrinsic principle of the Idea, a kind of poverty dear to existentialism. It is of course debatable to say that Kant anticipated the existentialist movement, but with Nietzsche prying him open on behalf of our postmodern sensibility, it is fair to say that he rather anticipated a different kind of existentialism whose silent persistence may be aptly termed as posthumanist.

It is our contention here that the posthuman is what Kant was already affirming in the wake of the first Critique. For us, this necessarily requires confronting the question ‘what is Man?’ But we are not trying to revive existentialism here whose ushering in continental philosophy was rather premature. Contemporary existentialism (or at least the movement initiated by Sartre) was rather founded on a misguided relation to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger himself avoided the problem of the singularity of Man which reached its zenith in his infamous “Letter on Humanism.”7 Heidegger’s eschewal of the question instead favoured an appropriated existentiality that is deemed capable of surpassing nihilism only because this time it is devoid of any kind of attraction for philosophy (its attraction, if at all, has to be favoured rather by the Event, an appropriation of the kind only a releasement to mystery could express [8]) to raise the question anew as Kant had already buried this concept.

And yet the question ‘what is Man?’ has never been more relevant as we are confronted today with a deluge of post-humanism/s whose Kantian roots have never been problematized to its right context and magnitude. At least Sartre attempted to raise the problem from the ground up but only to find once again that the problem is better left untouched as the question of Man, as it had been raised in existentialism, secretly followed Kant’s clue—that practical reason could save all the antinomies of reason. Sartre was very much a child of continental philosophy with its paradigmatic allegiance to reflexivity, to a celebration of apodictic (moral) freedom. This is where Nietzsche comes in, arguably the outsider vis-à-vis the tradition of continental thought.

The Eschewal of the Question

The failure to raise the question (‘What is Man?’) becomes associated with the rise of the ascetic ideal which Nietzsche connects to the Kantian legacy. The ascetic ideal, as Nietzsche declares, is the existential condition of Man in which he “would rather will nothingness than not will at all.[9] To raise the question ‘What is Man?’ is to thus problematize the nihilism, the will to will nothing, that avoiding the question begets. (The avoidance of the question ironically begets the humanism deemed as antidote to the nagging persistence of the question. If Heidegger hated the term, he was right however in pointing out its conceptual baggage. Yet, he was entirely oblivious of the real question itself. It is no surprise why Heidegger left Being and Time unfinished. The point is–it has never been the question of Being, but rather of the critic, of the ascetic vis-a-vis the death of God). Consequently, the problematization of nihilism modifies the question into the ‘who’ of the agency that can take on the task of transvaluation.

We are therefore not surprised when Kant stopped short of proposing the fourth question a propos of the three famous questions that the Critique of Pure Reason offers to its readers, namely, 1) What can I know? 2) What I ought to do? and 3) What may I hope? [10]. (Kant, however, raised the question in another work, in his lectures on Logic, but the effect is the same, as if the fourth question was never raised. In fact, according to him, the first three questions of the critique is already the question of Man). All throughout this questioning the presupposition of the unity of the ‘I’ gathers the three questions in an appropriative standpoint, that is, the standpoint of Man, but where Man has to be understood notwithstanding as a product of the noumenal appropriation of practical reason concerning the pre-existence of God, freedom and immortality. The fourth question contains a term neglected in Kant, which as Deleuze correctly intimates, is otherwise necessary to make sense of the question who will undertake the critique of values that Kant initiated but failed to provide the right agency capable of achieving the task. [11]

Is this agency the ‘posthuman’? No. The posthuman is the ascetic of Kant, the human whose exhaustion already provides the answer to the question whether nihilism can be overcome. The exhausted cannot accomplish this task. If Kant valorised the posthuman it is no surprise why. Philosophy remains hostage to Kant’s asceticism as does the ‘general intellect’, for instance, in relation to the power of Capital which can indefinitely delay the question of emancipation, the fourth question that Kant, the real avant-garde of capital, suppressed. It would otherwise require in the Deleuzian sense a counter-philosophy of joy, [12] a rejuvenation of the body from out of the territorialized landscapes of freedom, yet it is freedom that is no longer attached to an exemplary causality, such as God or the immortality of the soul, and even less to an affirmation that Capital—the most immanent causal form of nihilism—cannot be overcome.

This leads us to the radicalization of the fourth question from out of Nietzsche’s response to Kant’s questions in the Critique, that is, the question ‘who will undertake the critique of values’. Nietzsche charges this ‘who’ with the responsibility to undertake the transvaluation of values, the values that Kant resurrected from out of the ruins of traditional metaphysics while attempting to put a closure to it. In his most representative expression on this matter, Nietzsche says:

“Does one really in all seriousness still think (as the theologians deluded themselves for a while) that, for instance, Kant’s victory over the conceptual dogmas of theology (‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘freedom’, ‘immortality’) harmed [the] ideal? … What is certain is that, since Kant, all kinds of transcendentalists have once again won the day – they are liberated from the theologians: what luck! – Kant revealed to them the secret path along which they may from now on, in independence and with the greatest scientific respectability, pursue their ‘heart’s desire’.”[13]

We have never been posthuman in the same way the Kantian project of modernity, building on the efficacy of practical reason, is never meant as a forward march which arguably begets this post-human of contemporary theory, but as a regressive movement whose intention we were not allowed to suspect. The ‘post’ in the post-human is never meant as a projection, even less a trajectory for Kant lacked a conclusive assumption of time that can get away with the antinomies of reason which can yield equally true and false statements about the beginning and the lack of beginning of time. Recall that Kant dissolved the antinomies in favor of practical reason. But practical reason also lacks a projective aspect; needless to say, it is conservative, the one true virtue of modernity.

This is why we can never agree with Latour that ‘we have never been modern’.[14] Latour is discreetly defending Kant’s ascetic who in our time arguably possesses the power of reflexivity which can disabuse capitalism of its accelerating regression and hence to turn about in order to steer the course of history forward. On the contrary, we have always been modern as we have long before become ascetic whose reflexivity is never meant to raise the question of ‘who’ we have become.

The Way Forward

No doubt, capitalism or modernity has never been this-worldly. It thrives in the imaginary of the old world, its otherworldly character, whose values are the right values for its global dispensation. There lies the real faciality of nihilism—it is a nihilism that is devoid of any purpose except to delay the question of the ‘who’ in relation to the critique of values (or, in relation to the failed moment of existentialism, to suppress the real existentialism that Sartre also denied of us owing to his indebtedness to Kant, glossed over by his Nietzschean prose), and because the right agency to undertake the critique is blotted out in the picture, this nihilism has become a matter of pure willing, of practical reason. The regression of practical reason and the asceticism of philosophy today aims to silence the question, hence to deny the real threat of nihilism. Philosophy has become complicit with capital whose unmistakable goal is to deny the ultimate power of the question itself, the ‘who’ question which no longer requires philosophy and its audience, the question’s intrinsic power of the false [15] whose audience is rather flourishing beyond the walls of the asceticism of reason, beneath the locating, geo-tagging machines of capital.

The only way therefore is the way forward which requires of us that we turn about and face the real world behind us. But it is a world the posthuman will never ever choose to confront. It is a world already deep in ruins.

But already in this light, Nietzsche could not have chosen a more appropriate occasion to advocate an extreme type of garbage anthropology, the genealogy for our time, which illustrates for us that Kant’s rational anthropology has churned out a lot of cognitive post-human debris and more to pile up to the moral constitution of our psychotic age. It is indeed a stark contrast to the promise of clean and green ecology, what is promised precisely by the Critiques, the reconstruction of the ecology of the moral landscape of reason after destroying the old world along with its signature refuse – the bones of scholasticism. But against the background of climate entropy and ecological disasters, never has the question been more straightforward.

The ‘who question’ now addresses an army of sanitary workers, garbage collectors, waste disposal units, an assemblage of disaster management operatives; climate justice activists, hospice and rehab workers, and the like; peoples of deserted islands – the first victims of climate change, and the last men and women to whom the earth shall leave her place. Indeed, never has Nietzsche been much closer to the pedestrian, even more, truly prophetic of the power of the false – the power of the commons.

3. We are indebted to Deleuze with respect to the formulation of this question in his highly influential work Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983). See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 88.

4. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 136.

5. See Iain Hamilton Grant, ‘At the Mountains of Madness. The Demonology of the New Earth and the Politics of Becoming’, in Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.) Deleuze and Philosophy. The Difference Engineer (Routledge, London and New York), 104.

13. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 130-31.

15. Deleuze, heavily influenced by Nietzsche, develops this concept of the power of the false in his book Cinema 2: Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 121-38.

I take it from Adorno that culture is, among others, a mode of confronting nature [or world] (2009, 146).

This definition of culture, provisional as it may seem, overlaps with that of technology being a mode of letting things occur (Heidegger 1977) largely for human purposes, yet most often with a robust kind of intervention for nature or world to speak its inner laws. (We may recall here Aristotle’s concept of logos apophantikos which means to bring to light the hidden principles of nature in its activity). This broadly suggests that culture relates to nature or world by encountering it according to a plan, a scheme, a way of letting things reveal themselves out of their own light.

Already this definition (of culture) is an instance of the antinomial, the equal weight of truth or non-truth percolating evenly into two incompatible terms, namely, encounter (with the connotation of the aleatory, of chance occurrence, or roughly, an event) and purposeful planning whose aim is to dematerialize the contingency of all actual and possible modes of occurrences; in short, to make everything calculable.

This paradox is resolved otherwise by breaking a zone of indetermination in terms of subordinating its non-sense to the axiomatic dictates of human freedom (a la Kant) acting on its own; donating, in the absence of originary sense, a secondary sense to what would have been impervious to meaning. But already the second sense is the originary point of beginning, there being no other way to begin. (Is not this second sense already an act of culture which creates and founds any sense we can conceive, including the opposite complement of culture, namely, nature? Are not the humanities at fault here by setting off these two otherwise exchangeable terms?)

Incidentally, where giving originary sense is concerned, this is also what set-theory in mathematics exactly performs—to nominate a set that is not a member of any set but which necessarily begins the whole study of sets (Badiou 2009); an infinite empty set, to the exclusion of all other sets, that is by no means conceived mathematically, rather by an act similar to that which has turned the world into a fable a la Nietzsche (1968).

Incidentally, the first myths of creation are stories of how the world is created by an originary act of giving, of the gods (always the gods) giving, until its perfection in monotheism where it is rather the One God, excluding all others, not without the violence of wiping them out, including their actual human employers, who gives the ultimate law, the only Law, the supreme sense or meaning.

And voila, the paradox is solved, by any means a leap of faith; a leap into practical reason (where Kant would have much to say). Nietzsche is not so far from Marx on this point. Marx was referring to the early priest-ideologists who created the world that we live in, not that there is no pre-given world, a world that is always already available for capture, for settlement, for dwelling, for building; a world where poetry is already in place, where love speaks a thousand words in a thousand plateaus in a thousand never-ending worlds of make-believe, rather this world would have no use to the species if it is not already transformed for human purposes. As Marx and Engels (1998) put it in The German Ideology: “Individuals have always proceeded from themselves.”

To bring home our point, this capacity of human freedom resonates strongly in Marx’s own subordination of the inherent conflict of capitalism to the one-party dictatorship of the oppressed class. The oppressed class in question here can be afforded, notwithstanding, the same characteristics as those that make culture operational, a way of breaking a paradox whose very nature as indiscernible, to quote Marx, “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Eighteenth Brumaire). To cast this nightmare, a counter-culture is summoned to carry out what is no different from an exorcising ritual—to cleanse, to purify, to purge; to level everything onto an imagined point of origination where everything begins anew.

This is the utopia of human freedom—to bend necessity, or what qualifies as the all-pervasive determinant of the indeterminate, the ineffable, the inarticulate, the uncanny, the unhomely, the Freudian unconscious, if you will; everything that melts into a paradox, so to speak, to freedom’s own self-unpacking rule. Here, we obtain a homologous network of complementary terms—axiom, freedom, fabulation. In a manner of speaking, an axis of composition whose unifying rhetoric is well-known—the destruction of the old.

Yet, as with Nietzsche, with the destruction of the real world the apparent one sets in with new possibilities on offer; a new mode of godding, of summoning a new god or gods whose goal is ultimate—to turn the world once more into a fable.

In lieu of a conclusion

With the turn of the century, we have welcomed a new mode of godding replacing the ethereal pride of the dreamland of all dreams, heaven they call it, where everyone else who gets to die gets each a big mansion (recall the movie Invention of Lying). This is the hyper-extensive realism of the infosphere commanding new ways of living or not living while still managing to live, the online-offline sway of our being-in-the-world in the present replacing Heidegger’s homely concept of being as the dance, the echo, the swaying to and fro of Being, as poetic clearing (Heidegger 1999). This is the hyper-real world which sets everything in place, in the order of quantum reality, complex algorithms, nano-machine and intelligence; in the order of the becoming-other of human who has never been human, who has always been other than human (ah, the hubris of all elitist inventions!), in an era where economies of confronting scarcity and a dying planet are giving way to precarious adaptation; in the order where capital threatens to finally erase its labor complement in the same manner that culture is overturning the independence of natural ecology. Welcome to the anthropocene.

Again, a whiff of Nietzsche: Are we looking at a new paradox in need of a new culture to break? Or do we need a break?

To begin with, I am proposing here a homology between deconstruction and the practice of Cultural Studies premised on a particular conception of culture, following Raymond Williams’s guide definition for the studies (Williams 1983: 87-93). Below is a recent re-translation by Spivak of some passages in Derrida’s famous Of Grammatology.

The movements of deconstruction do not shake up structures from the outside. They are neither possible and effective, nor can they set their aim [ajuster leur coup], except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction is always, in a certain way, swept away by [emportée par] its own work. (Spivak 2011: xxxii).

It can be argued that Cultural Studies’ conception of culture bears a striking resemblance to deconstruction’s relation to its own practice—‘swept away by its own work.’ Catherine Gallagher (1995) describes this rather positively as an ‘absence of specifics’, a proposition that also furnishes us with a reluctant opening onto a certain consistency with tradition, regarding its conception of ‘culture’:

It is this absence of specifics conjoined with a heavy investment in the idea of specifics that gives the word culture as used by cultural critics an uncanny resemblance to its much-maligned Arnoldian twin, high culture with a capital C. We may have rejected the restriction of culture to a privileged realm of ‘art’ and the belief that its value derives from transcendent human universals rather than from concrete historical circumstances; nevertheless, our use of culture and Arnold’s have more in common than is generally recognized. (Gallagher 1995: 309)

The mere mention of Derrida’s deconstruction and its relation to cultural studies is not given certain theoretical affordances here as to simply amplify the significance of deconstruction to the discipline. What I wish to convey rather is that deconstruction is what the use of ‘culture’ is all about, that is, culture as a text in itself which resists interpretation of the positive representational sort; what Heidegger would describe as presence-at-hand (Heidegger 2001), that which is rendered in and through language. Here, cultural studies’ guide definition for ‘culture’, nonetheless, is not impermeable to critique.

The basic supposition of culture as text is a product of the infiltration of psychoanalysis and its notion of the unconscious to Cultural Studies (Williams 1983: 320-23). I like to note here though that Williams himself in a number of occasions felt that the infiltration of psychoanalysis left more to be desired (Williams 1981: 167). Even so, the force of psychoanalysis is still there, and with Adorno utilizing psychoanalysis in relation to mass media, the infiltration cannot be ignored (see Adorno 1991). The unconscious qualifies, in a manner of speaking, as a dark precursor (physical or biological) that precedes language (which is readily associated with bringing things to light, thus, to illuminate). In Heideggerian terms, it is rather described as the pre-ontological horizon of intelligibility (see Heidegger 2001), that which no amount of representational language can penetrate. Nonetheless, as it is with negentropy in physics (or negating entropy), the use of language to represent a dark assemblage as the unconscious, presumably, a storehouse of forces and energy essential for life to emerge (yet also a minefield that can threaten life’s continuity), comes with the risk of provoking the return of the repressed (Freud 1965; Lacan 1988:171). Language amounts to blowing up a pristine homeostatic condition in which forces of life and death are suspended in a mutually non-active state (Schrodinger 1992). It is in this sense, taking things from here a bit fast to drive home our point, that human organization which is always already mediated by language (language co-arises with the human species) is a risky negotiation with what Freud, and later expanded by Lacan, called the death drive (see Lacan 1988: 27-92). Much to the concern of a cultural theorist like Nietzsche, for instance, it is for this reason that life bears the mark of in-security and thereof the will to negate it (see Nietzsche 1996) by means of securitizing culture. What culture amounts to, in extreme terms, is a biopolitical repression of the death drive.

In general terms, the culture that we believe we can represent in a number of helpful terms can be traced back to the beginnings of agriculture which subsequently evolved into the practice of usury and debt—the first forms of biopolitical organization for the control of population perfected in modern finance capitalism (Graeber 2011). Yet, the control of population is inscribed within the very terms of controlling life, or the deprivation of life, its enabling resources, to those who could be utilized, or made to stand as reserves (in Heidegger’s coinage [1977]) for sustaining a condition in which the maximum goal is to fend off the return of the repressed, the death drive. In the history of humankind this ‘return’ has been objectively qualified as apocalyptic, with the negative connotation accruing upon its destructive power. As a side note, I would like to propose here that the apocalyptic complex that has defined the way life has been hitherto organized is broadly anchored on agri-culture, or the manner in which the sedentarization of people’s movement since the introduction of farming and husbandry has repressed, not without certain positive features (but are now at risk of totalizing human life itself), the nomadic or exilic character of human existence whose model is the pre-primitive (vis-à-vis the ‘primitive’ as a modern ascriptor of the progress of human history), or the pre-historical, pre-sedentary mobility of the nomad.

We can also speak here, not without the risk of being misunderstood, that this character of the human can be identified as pre-cultural. Notwithstanding though, as the notion of ‘the human’ may appear to be pre-fabricated as to warrant a strong correlation between human and culture (in the ‘agreed’ sense, human and culture are synonymous), we are at the ready to extend our assumption further into a more adversarial position—that ‘we have never been human’ in the first place, hence, the questionable term ‘culture’ as coterminous with the human.

That ‘we have never been human’ is our propositional challenge to the unopposed assumption of the human that provides the context for cultural studies. Lest I provoke more criticisms than can be warranted, I must clarify that the proposition ‘we have never been human’ is not a denial of the existence of the species that has for some time now called itself, or has been accustomed to call itself ‘human’. It is rather the particular organization or investment of values to the species (which, I believe, what ‘culture is in a nutshell), in a manner that decides for it, on its behalf, that becomes our target here. For certainly, this kind of investment is neither neutral nor anonymous (see Rosaldo 1989).

A cultural critic may readily oppose us here, especially, in light of deconstructive practice that is still very much a guiding force for cultural studies. A deconstructive ‘use’ of culture for the studies certainly exhibits fluidity, never aspiring to a treatment of culture as a fossil. Yet, deconstruction cannot deconstruct what is undeniably an ontological priority for language—the human who is capable of the highest culture (animals have culture too) which language evidently represents. We can radicalize our critique of deconstruction here to as far as declaring that deconstruction’s influence on cultural studies has made the studies the epitome of the humanism of modernity—this despite the much avowed description of culture as historical and contingent, thus providing theoretical arsenals for the studies to challenge the notoriety of humanistic assumptions prevalent in the West (see Rosaldo 1989:32). The rise of post-colonial studies that complement the study of culture is a case in point. Even so, we have reached a point where post-colonial discourse has to give way to a diffluent force of time.

I am deploying the term ‘diffluent’ (or flowing away) to underscore the fact that not only are we compelled to interrogate our assumptions vis-à-vis the shifting tides of the time, its ebb and flow, but also, in the face of the withdrawal of time itself, its force and influence upon the contemporary in a manner that makes time ironically stand still. To paraphrase Heidegger, we have to learn how to be ‘in the draft’ (1993: 375), and be cast into the sea change at the same time that we are pointing towards that which withdraws. Nevertheless, the greatest challenge lies in how we can still point to time as it withdraws while appearing to be at rest; in more precise terms, the appearance of things that their capacity for change has already been saturated, leaving us with nothing to hope for.

Perhaps, this conviction is best expressed in Fredric Jameson’s words which caution us rather than wallow in defeatism: ‘It is easy to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ (Jameson 2003). The apocalyptic weight of history has been exhausting the political imagination of the species in such a way that the biopolitical control of life (that we mentioned earlier) has totalized the rest of the earthbound, including us. What we need here, and this is our proposal, is to untangle the humanity ‘at work’, the humanity as ‘material’ for political economy, for biopolitical control, and release this humanity to a serialization process, a de-familiarization process (to parenthesize Bahktin), or better yet a de-materialization of which the species is no stranger after all (imagine here how this once animal assemblage has leaped into consciousness). We can also mean here to de-culture the species. Yet, more than this connotation, we are talking of the nomad as a model whose never-ending quest for virtuality in the sense of resisting finality and organization has never ceased to infiltrate ‘our’ existence as a species, especial mention here is the case of nomad peoples of Southeast Asia (Scott 2009), despite the planetary securitization of culture whose first form was the concentration of life to agri-culture. It is in this sense that humanity has never been in ‘it’, in a culture; rather, most of us, if not all, are formally economized which has made us into the humans that we believe we are, at least in appearance.

And that is the precisely point: what matters for biopolitical control is the formidable appearance of culture.

References

Adorno, T (1991) Kultur and Culture. Social Text 99 (27): 145-158.
Freud, S (1965) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Strachey, J. New York: Norton.
Gallagher, C (1995) ‘Raymond Williams and Cultural Studies.’ In: (ed) Prendergast, C (1995) Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Graeber, D (2009) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, New York: Melville House.
Heidegger, Martin (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. Lovitt, W. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
________. (1993) Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger, ed Krell, D. F. . London: Routledge.
________. (2001) Being and Time, trans. Macquarie, J and Robinson, R. Oxford: Basil, Blackwell.
Jameson, Fredric (2003) Future City. New Left Review 21: 65-79.
Lacan, J (1988) Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954-1955), trans. Tomaselli, S. ed. Miller, J-A. New York and London: Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, F (1996) On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Smith, D. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Scott, James (200) The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
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While I was revisiting Marcuse last summer, I was fortunate to have extra time to accommodate a personal game of metaphysics. A certain Bruce Lee, in fact threw me a question I couldn’t resist taking on. Obviously, I am not talking of the real Bruce Lee; truth is whether there was a real one I am not sure anymore. Between TV and reality, there is only the couch. And so, with the speed of a kung fu, he asked me if I can reconcile St. Thomas with Daoism, and needless to say, I was amazed at his capacity to defamiliarize a scorching summer afternoon, as if throwing a cold water on my face. This guy is the real Bruce Lee. For an unexplainable aspect even on this part of my association game (identifying his mental (was it?) acts with Bruce Lee’s martial prowess), I rushed to my metaphysical boardroom (there’s no way I could tell how many came and who I was conjuring up to parley with) and started to prepare my answer. He was out for a KFC chicken when I got back with my answer.

The question, in other words, is: Is it possible to reconcile a philosophy that appeals to transcendence with practically a non-philosophy (strictly, where philosophy is not invoked) whose notion of transcendence, if at all, is always already given in the immanence it promotes as the practical ground of the real?

Now you are in my boardroom. Let me continue

If we will choose to reconcile transcendence and immanence in a more general setting, we will need a third term which could structurally unite the two terms whose unity is under consideration here. The third term might be found to be intrinsic to each of the two terms though in some sense repressed, or it might be after all extrinsic to them. On the one hand, the unity of transcendence and immanence may be said to be a taken for granted fact; on the other hand, we can have a unity only if occasioned by an outside force which is neither transcendent nor immanent. The latter case is familiar to Western philosophy.

We are referring to occasionalism which invokes an external causality seeming to lack the constancy of intention to settle the disputations of immanence across the physical and spiritual dimensions of life. The famous occasionalist statement that it is not fire that burns the cotton, rather it is God can however be repaired to recast our option in favor of an external form of causality that is neither transcendent nor immanent, assuming that each position basically requires an intention. If we can demonstrate that this externality does not possess the intention intrinsic to a determinate position (transcendence or immanence), then we may have obtained the perfect recipe for unity. In other words, we need to demonstrate that the unity is not borne by any interest. But first, we need to prove that a basic form of occasionalism pervades the two determinate positions without actually being a part of either position as to warrant an accommodation of causality in the occasional form we have given to this possibility of unity. What we mean here is simple: the unity is neither taken for granted nor anticipated; rather, it comes, arrives without rhyme or reason.

First, how can it be demonstrated vis-à-vis the Thomistic notion of truth? Is there an occasional form of causality that we can identify in Thomism? Is there something of the sort comparable to an arrival of truth in Thomism caused by a lack of intention on the part of that which causes our participation in the intrinsic process of truth? A Thomist would readily dispute our initial questions here. God is not an occasionalist. He does not lack the intention as Creator. The presence of reason meanwhile guarantees that this intention is accessible (in immanence) in the form of partaking in the divine will. It is in fact reason that takes the place of the constancy of intention of God that guarantees that no occasional form of causation can ever take place. Reason therefore must constantly work. It will never run out of conditions against which it must work on behalf of God, for reason by virtue of the constancy of its intention will never finish its work until God makes His appearance. Reason will never know, nonetheless, when God will do so. This is the principle of indeterminacy that gives to God, alas, the occasional form that is discouraged by doctrinal Thomism.

In Thomism there is nothing outside the realm of rational participation in the divine will until the divine wills that reason grind to a halt (such as the case of Thomas when he stopped writing after God appeared to Him). Here, there are consequences to bear. Recall that St. Thomas insists that truth is adequation (between the intellect and the thing). The adequation holds until God wills that reason stop working. In the will of God, truth ceases to be an adequation. But no reason can divine the will of God. Reason must therefore leave it to occasionalism, to the principle of indeterminacy to explain (even so, an explanation that does not explain) why God would will Himself to make an appearance. Beyond the capability of reason to explain lies the opportunity of the occasionalist. And why would God appear to reason? Occasionalism has no answer (that is the answer) except it is in the will of God to will His appearance.

At this point, let us proceed to Daoism as quickly as we can get. In fact, it is not difficult to detect the occasionalist in the Dao. It is said that in the Dao, one lets reality come to you, one never seeks reality. The Dao is the so-called Yin/Yang, complementary forces, so to speak. Yet, this time, rather than the principle of indeterminacy that we briefly explored in Thomism, the Dao is governed by complementarity, similar to a particular strand of quantum physics developed by Niels Bohr. In naïve terms, the principle of complementarity states that there are various approaches to observing reality but one can observe reality only when other approaches are isolated to give preference to one approach. The preference for one approach does not necessarily make the other approaches invalid. The thing is it is physically impossible to do all approaches. Compare this principle to a Daoist saying: “When truth intent does not scatter, yin and yang naturally harmonise.”

From all indications, however, our comparison between the Dao and the complementarity theory of quantum physics seems to stabilise the standpoint of human observation (immanence). By human observation in quantum terms we also mean not scattering the intent of truth in Daoist terms. Here, the crucial index of comparison is intention which is immanent as against the lack of intention of transcendence (as we discussed in Thomism). In Daoism, intention is a key element in understanding reality, whereas in Thomism, intention in the final analysis gives way to the occasionalism of a more universal will. Earlier, we argued that intention should be discounted as an index of unity (of transcendence and immanence). Intention has to give way to a neutral standpoint, neither transcendent nor immanent. In the case of Daoism and quantum physics, intention is a privileged standpoint. If this is so, then, according to our scheme, the yin and yang of Daoism do not satisfy the occasionalism of truth. Occasionalism proposes that the unity of transcendence and immanence must not be borne by interest. The unifier must lack constancy of intention which the principle of complementarity does not satisfy. But, alas, quantum physics tells us that the universe is a superposition rather than a constancy of intention.

As a superposition of different subatomic particles (which makes the universe a wave if seen from a distance), the universe does not have a unified intention. Rather, it is composed of varying standpoints, each may be seen differently from the others (assuming that one particular standpoint is capable of escaping the superposition which is theoretically possible when one begins to observe reality during which time something is released from a superposition: recall here that subatomic particles behave as wave when unobserved [meaning, a kind of observation by the naked eye] and as particles when observed [meaning, with sophisticated instruments) yet side by side are indifferent to one another. Only from an outside vantage point can they be observed seemingly to be a wave functioning reality with all the appearances of unity in terms of undisturbed propagation. In other words, when observed from within reality functions as a particle which is theoretically the true dimension of the real. Here, truth means a particle observing a wave phenomenon which is nonetheless internally also a particle.

It pays to correlate this quantum reality to another saying in Daoism: “When you understand the method of bringing sense to stabilise essence/The human mentality does not arise and the mind of the Tao is complete.” The stability of essence (or depth of reality in terms of particle) is dependent on the correct method of making sense of reality as wave. In the principle of complementarity, the correct understanding of the method is not to utilize all available methods. Even so, understanding in this context requires that mentality does not assert itself or exercise its will to escape from the superposition in order to stabilise reality. By staying within the superposition, one maintains the upkeep of the universe as a wave. Daoism says: “Bathe and incubate/Do not let thoughts arise/Do no let attention scatter.” As a complement of occasionalism, Daoism teaches us to be a non-intending particle (in which one does not scatter his attention in order to be noticed) in whose quietism the universe allows to be seen as a wave, as a unity of transcendence and immanence.

Theoretically, a particle can be seen by another particle, provided that that which observes is not scattering its intent or attention, meaning, it too must not choose to observe and be observed. In other words, in quantum physics a particle cannot choose another particle to observe it. One never seeks (a wave) reality.

At this point, arguably, we have found the third term (in both Thomism and Daoism) that will unite transcendence and immanence, or the reverse complement: we have found the occasional form of unity that will unite Thomism and Daoism. On the part of the third term, the occasional unity is a quantum leap.
…

Conclusion

And Bruce Lee? I guess he never felt so hungry.

Postscript (The best part of summer)

Two welcome reliefs from ‘Bruce Lee’ courtesy of one of my all-time favorites, Sophie Hunger:

Notes for a Work in Progress

Introduction

It is known to scholars of Marcuse that his engagement with Heidegger by taking the phenomenological route laid out by Husserlian phenomenology had rekindled his waning Marxist sensibility in the wake of the totalitarian atrocities of Soviet Marxism. This essay takes a view of Marcuse’s early turn to phenomenology as providing Marcuse the perfect opportunity to develop a new theory of socialism, but failed to radicalize in the end. The crux of the matter is that he later rejected the phenomenological reduction (cf. Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History, 2005) that had once provided him a close reading of Heidegger’s text essential in reconfiguring his socialist instinct.

We proceed, hence, with the question: If he was able to restore his Marxist sensibility through an engagement with (Husserlian) phenomenology (culminating in his appropriation of Heidegger) why would he reject the phenomenological reduction later, around the period of the publication of his second book on Hegel, Reason and Revolution? In this work, Marcuse is still reconciling Marx and Heidegger through the lenses of Heidegger charging Hegel (this time, a more serious accusation that Heidegger originally labelled against Hegel) of simply repeating what Aristotle had already said. We may speculate here, not without a basis, that Marcuse is seeking to distance Marx from the influence of Hegel who appeared to have lost originality, therefore preparing the clearing, untouched by Hegel, for the ultimate version of Heidegger-Marxismus. On both occasions, however, Marcuse would not have done anything possible for articulating Heidegger-Marxismus without the phenomenological reduction.

If our conjecture is right, Marcuse would have dispensed with Hegel whose notion of historicity (which he must have assumed Heidegger lacked, which is of course wrong; Heidegger had developed one of the most original conceptions of historicity) had given him philosophical leverage to critique orthodox Marxism (which is right). Here, Marcuse is faced with a dilemma which as one could notice started to arise with a simple shift in his thinking, that is to say, his rejection of phenomenological reduction. We think that this dilemma actually shaped his contradictory embrace of freedom as an end in itself (especially in works such Eros and Civilization and One Dimension Man) which he draws from Hegel as we will try to show in the succeeding discussions.

Confused Marxist sensibility

Marcuse had intuited something of crucial weight to Heidegger-Marxismus (though failed to radicalize, least to say, detected what it was in its determinate form) when he was apparently seeking to distance Marx from Hegel (unlikely, on Heidegger’s prodding as Heidegger was known for his aversion towards Marx and his rather little opinion of Hegel). Hegel’s notion of freedom is problematic for Marx, though you will be surprised what it actually was in Hegel that Marx saw. Marx had only intuited it yet had never developed into a full blown theory. If, again, our conjecture is right, both Marx and Marcuse failed to fully comprehend that Hegel’s notion of freedom is problematic because of its exclusive nature as desire that is resistant to a notion of end. Yet, this failure has to be qualified.

Marcuse failed in his appropriation of Hegel’s notion of freedom by taking it as a positive affirmation of hope for the future of humanity when in fact Hegel took freedom to be the desire for no end, freedom being an end in itself. Freedom has no future, plain and simple.

For his part, Marx failed to see in Hegel what he must see, that freedom is a trap he could get away with from his first attempt at breaking with Hegel’s notion of freedom, that is, a productive principle that knows no end (recall Marx’s critique of the insatiability of bourgeois economy) but eventually held by it as the trap appeared in a better disguise. We are referring here to Marx’s challenge to the production principle of Hegel that dismisses any end, that is to say, his proposition that capitalism will actually end by self-destruction. Here, we are digressing a bit into Marx who is undeniably an important influence on Marcuse.

When Marx expressed his conviction that capitalism would self-destruct by inventing a new labor, a new subjectivity, or the proletariat that would bring it to its knees, he forgot (and he forgot even his own formulation as we will see) that by having invented a new labor and a new subjectivity, which Marx called real subsumption of labor, capitalism has completely broken with the past (or so Marx thought). Capitalism needs to break with the past to deprive the vestiges of the old to disrupt the new order which could still challenge its self-determination. The proletariat who displaced the slave from the old order can therefore be viewed as particularly designed to sustain and perpetuate the new order. In this theoretical sense, capitalism has no rival within history. The bourgeoisie’s fate is sealed.

Theoretically it would follow that the real self-destruction of capitalism, or the possibility of it, was already superseded by real subsumption of labor, or the invention of labor itself, which could continue infinitely. This earlier period in the stage of capital accumulation may be referred to as the time capitalism was still expropriating the existing labor of the old world, dependent on it, the remnants of feudalism or the labor of the slave in relatively advanced form. Marx took a high risk when he discouraged communists to seize power when the mode of production or capital accumulation was still dependent on expropriation of old labor. Politically, nonetheless, that is the perfect opportunity to seize power when capitalism was actually self-destructing, unaware that the labor of the old world could combine against it. Our model is Lenin who was the first to understand the Hegelian mechanism at work in Marx. The moment capitalism surpassed this precarious stage in its history, the world would never be the same again. Once and for all, Marx, a true Hegelian, did not wish the socialist revolution to overtake capitalism. We are not saying it was deliberate on the part of Marx to deceive the communist movement. Rather, it was a simple case of a lingering Hegelianism that shaped his uncanny philosophical militancy.

With Hegel prodding him, Marx got it wrong when he declared that the proletariat is the nemesis of capitalism. The real nemesis of capitalism is the bourgeoisie itself that has perfected the production principle as desire that knows no end. But as nemesis, the bourgeoisie is the perfection of the Hegelian notion of negativity. It does not actually rival itself by opposing itself seriously. This is the rule of the negative—nothing oppositional should be actually sustained; every opposition should be restored to its negative unity. We can qualify the production principle of bourgeois economy then as self-destructive. But it is not actually self-destructing, in the Hegelian sense. Here, we cannot doubt that Marx took the logic of self-destruction (to refer to the positive self-destructing logic of capitalism) from Hegel’s (negative) dialectic. But did Marx intend to radicalize this dialectic to mean actual self-destruction? This we are no longer sure anymore. We may grant an affirmative answer to the question, yet Marx again is mistaken when he chose a wrong agency that could induct capitalism to self-destruction.

On this aspect, Marcuse intuited this new agency in his conviction that capitalism could be challenged from the outside; an agency which refuses to be governed by capitalism. He is right to our estimation. From the outside should mean also ‘not the proletariat’ as it is ingrained in the system itself. It should also be outside of the economy, an aneconomy, so to speak. Perhaps, outside of the capitalist economy, a non-capitalist economy but because it is an absurdity (a non-capitalist economy is no economy at all) let us propose rather an oxymoron, a socialist economy.

Socialism (which is a non-economy) is rather taken here by means of a political act as the economy, the economizing of what is viewed (starting in Hegel) as the foundation of the economic (the insatiability of freedom or desire). This is the kind of socialism we can assert against the Hegelian socialism of Marx. (The scope of this paper, however, dictates us that this aspect should be reserved for a separate topic). Marcuse is a socialist but his socialism due to his misplaced understanding of Hegelian notion of freedom as production is not the socialism that could have been his best theoretical contribution. Owing to this, Marcuse’s self-contradictoriness, which starts with his rejection of the phenomenological reduction, takes an even more unimaginable turn as he proceeds to elaborate his positions. When we turn to his appropriation of Freud’s alleged theory of Desire this has never been more glaring.

The Hegelian ‘Freud’ of Marcuse

In strictly Freudian terms, instincts or drives exhibit unique plasticity in the sense that they can substitute their aims for another, in a way keeping the instinct or drive alive and out of reach by death. In a manner of speaking, instincts are intelligent creatures which can manage to fall apart without actually going into pieces (and they really display some intelligence if by intelligence we can assign an aim-directed energy which involves a considerable amount of calculation). Yet, we have to be careful in equating instincts to desire. Desire is another matter for Freud.

Call it a metaphysical conatus, but Freud understood it quite differently from his fellow Jew, Spinoza. Freud was a serious reader of Schopenhauer and this basically anticipates Freud’s conception of desire vis-à-vis Hegel with whom Schopenhauer had more than a professional issue to settle. Suffice it to say that Freud understood desire according to its representations, its objectifications. Freud has no formal account of desire except when he talks of instincts and drives which point to something no analysis can reach (in the same way, Schopenhauer tells us that the closest we could divine of the will is its representations). But instincts or drives already presuppose of a source which even if science has identified it as somatic is still a qualified statement. Instincts presuppose of a source that is beyond examination for they can surely tell us that they are a product of a long evolutionary pre-history of the species that did not self-originate.

Freud started to tell us a bit of this complicated issue in evolution in his later re-examination of the psychopathology of hysteric patients. Freud observed in his patients a compulsive obsessive tendency to re-experience painful memories. He surmised (this is the controversial death instinct) that this is a sign of a larger than life force which reorients the organism back to an original state of constancy. This force remains enigmatic for Freud, a theoretical compliment of Schopenhauer’s concept of willing, bordering in esoteric Buddhism.

What we are telling here is that Desire for Freud has a more enigmatic origin than the drives whose source of excitation is somatic. Freud however has arrived at this notion of Desire on the strength of observable psychic behaviour which gives us a model of how drives are enigmatically oriented to a larger than life force, but more importantly how drives can be manipulated to orient themselves to a false end or termination in the guise of reconstructing an original state of happiness as is humanly possible. For Freud, the enigma of Desire exacts contradictory demands on our instincts (id) that we find ourselves vulnerable to manipulation without actually being aware of it (where the function of the superego is taken to excess [guilt formation] in the absence of a social relief from those contradictory demands). This leads to his recommendation that a necessary amount of repression is permissible in society to allay the turbulence especially of the ego which is tasked to balance the contradictory demands of the instincts, metaphysically, the demands of life and death.

We know that Marcuse takes this theory of the instincts quite differently from Freud (cf. Eros and Civilization). For Marcuse, banking on the unlimited potential of desire for free creation, instincts should be given leeway to express themselves freely. Marcuse’s conviction rests on his assumption, quite liberally taken from Marx, that the liberation of Man consists in reuniting Him with Nature in the unfolding of a sensuous culture (equivalent to Marx’s species-being). The conditions of possibility for such sensuous culture to be established are already available in the margins of capitalist consumerism. The task of critical theory is to extract, and here we are using Althusser’s notion of determination in the last instance, the hidden or repressed positive kernel of the present historical condition to deliver it to the satisfaction of all (by which Marcuse meant the sensuous deliverance of desire from false gratification which for Marcuse is not sensuous enough, its orientation driven to satisfying false needs).

The aim of capitalism is for gratification not to penetrate deep into the energy pool of instincts where real potentials for free creation, least to say, capacities for destroying a repressive system of gratification, are systematically kept untapped and on purpose as these instincts are being pressed upon with contradictory demands. Marcuse believes that society has long been repressive enough but also at the same time inversely creating perfect opportunities for the instincts to self-manage and self-administer thereby also empowering themselves with little opportunities they have for gratification. These potentials have already matured to take on the responsibility of transforming the social body. Marcuse is critical of Freud’s recommendation for society to repress the instincts on the grounds that Freud misunderstood their self-creating potential. Marcuse draws on Marx on this aspect. In a passage from Marx’s early writings the founder of modern communism says: “Production does not only produce man as a commodity …. Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity.” (As a digression, we can glimpse in Marx the beginnings of an object-oriented ontology much in fashion in Philosophy today; cf. Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, 2005, although it differs in scope from Marx). In this passage it is clear that Marx understood that no matter how repressive it is the system cannot totally reduce labor into a mere commodity, an object or thing. Insofar as the commodity is a product of his labor, the commodity assumes Man’s potentiality in a new form—that which he could freely enjoy if only the system allows him so. Obviously, this is a needed corrective to Freud’s pessimistic theory of the instinct.

Back to Phenomenology

So far so good. But where did Marcuse get it all wrong? The answer lies in his wrong notion of Freud’s notion of Desire as if Freud had a formal concept of it. He in fact attributed to the instinct what he should have attributed to Desire, except that, as we are arguing, desire is absolutely anterior and ulterior to signification. Marcuse’s notion of instincts as freely creative and resistant to Ananke (necessity) misplaces Freud’s emphasis on instincts. Freud avoided the metaphysical dilemma intrinsic to Desire which explains his focus on the instincts as phenomenologically observable. We are not saying here that Marcuse misread Freud. The crux of the matter is his reading of Freud’s theory of instincts under a Hegelian lens. We recall here that Hegel viewed freedom as desire as self-production that knows no end, the void of negativity. In other words, Hegel’s notion of freedom surreptitiously seeped into his reading of Freud, in that he mistook Freud to be referring to desire when he is referring to the instincts.

Blame it rather on his Marxist sensibility. Again, we can recall here that even Marx fell into the Hegelian trap. As for Marx’s own issue with Hegel, we can reserve it for another discussion. Suffice it to say here that for us Marcuse’s problematic appropriation of Freud can be traced to his problematic relation to phenomenological reduction. Through the phenomenological reduction, he was able to renew his Marxist sensibility, but rejected it later in the attempt to strengthen this Marxist sensibility, this time purifying Marx of Hegelian influence, assuming that he was able to suspend (epoche) the actual influence of Hegel on Marx. Theoretically, this makes for a sound argument in light of the Heidegger-Marxismus where Hegel is apparently relegated to the margins if not completely silenced. But why would he need to silence Hegel? He did not actually silence Hegel, as he wrote another book on Hegel (Reason and Revolution) after his dissertation (Hegel’s Ontology and Theory of Historicity). We claim rather that he was consigning to silence something in Hegel and this is his theory of freedom (as desire that knows no end). He was able to do this—to keep Hegel’s theory of freedom under the radar of critical analysis—by also leaving no trace of the process under which Hegel’s theory of freedom was secretly smuggled into his theory of instincts. We are referring here to his rejection of the phenomenological reduction.

Postscript

Slavoj Zizek has criticized Marcuse’s appropriation of Freud along similar lines we have taken so far vis-à-vis the theory of instincts and therefore we do not intend to repeat what he has said in his admiringly comprehensive book Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. We agree with Zizek’s critique except that Zizek did not provide us a genealogy of Marcuse’s appropriation of Freud, which to us stared with his problematic relation to phenomenology. On this aspect of Marcuse we are taking the cue from Andrew Feenberg in his book Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (2005) where he mentioned Marcuse’s problematic relation to phenomenological reduction, though, again, did not offer a deeper genealogical background for such problematic appropriation. This essay intends to broaden this cue by revisiting the path Marcuse had taken since his encounter with Heidegger until his turn to aesthetics, as briefly as it could be done here.

On the larger background, our critical analysis of Marcuse along the lines we intend to explore more is rather taken from a more invasive theory of Desire (traversing Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Deleuze) that we are working on for some time, preceding my interest in Marcuse. (My intended study here is to locate Marcuse within this larger background, so logically Marcuse would occupy a critical section). Marcuse is viewed by many, even within critical theory, as already dated. But they are wrong. Critical theory is in fact wrong. And if we look at the background of Critical Theory’s appropriation of Freud through Hegel (especially the early Frankfurt School), we can say that Critical Theory itself is problematic, not that it is entirely wrong.

P.S.

My thanks to Jeffrey Occay (Ph.D., University of Macquarie) for rekindling my Marcuse from my former student activism days. Attending his course was well worth braving the untold passion of a mighty Sun going amuck over my side of the world.

That’s a shock advertisement. And the serious side where my work “Designing the Apocalypse” alongside a review of Timothy Morton’s phenomenal Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World is mentioned by Bookforum–

“A showcase for rigorous and elegant writing” (the Village Voice). Founded in 1994, the print magazine is published five times a year and the website is updated daily.

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Long ago the philosophers found the answers and as writers, we articulated these in enduring prose and poetry. It’s the scientists who must now provide this hope, this reality, and for the writers to record the promise and fruition of that reality.

But let us go back to the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, whose radicalization I appreciate. The University has come out with an excellent journal, the Mabini Review. Its first issue contains excellent essays by Virgilio Rivas and Kristoffer Bolanos. Its literary section deserves to be enlarged to include fiction and poetry like the excellent contribution of Dennis Aguinaldo. The review should contain more critical studies on our vernaculars and particularly our English literature to locate it in the context of world literature.

More on the humanities, too, and eventually venture into original thought so that Philippine philosophy will progress beyond the pioneering baseline studies on values by F. Landa Jocano and Leonardo Mercado. Creative thinking will then develop in the manner that German, French, even American philosophies have emerged as distinct additions to classic Western thought.

I promised to National Artist F. Sionil Jose that I would write a review of his novel Viajero which I will be posting here in three or four parts. This is my way of appreciating him for his wonderful words on my essay “Axioms of Choice” which appeared in The Mabini Review. I guess what made the essay into his liking is its kindred treatment of an-arche which I always suspected, since my senior high school days, was the untold philosophical horizon of his many if not all of his creative works. Yet Sionil Jose’s anarchism, as he put it in a personal conversation, is the anarchism of the old. I take it as one that is akin to the anarchism of Jacques Ellul, another philosophical inspiration of mine, and James Scott whose Art of Not Being Governed is certainly a classic of ‘an-arche’ thought. In the following review, nonetheless, I tried to connect his anarchism to Deleuze and Guattari’s more contemporary treatment of rhizomes, of bodies without organs. As soon as I finished posting all the parts here, I will upload the entire review to my academia page.

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–To Kafka Ortega

What do we live for but to be a happy witness to a will more powerful than ours?[i]

In his dying moments, afflicted by an unknown disease and a more piercing malady that he hoped to find the cure for his people, Salvador Raza, Viajero’s main protagonist, uttered those words to himself yet unsure even of who he is, much more of that strange bidding that is overpowering him. Was it the numbness of his real origin? Was it the indifference of history? The limitation of the Filipino soul? By the same token, the following lines from Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund capture Salvador’s otherwise than a psychological predicament:

How will you die when your time comes … since you have no mother? Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.”[ii]

And yet, by its portrayal of how the time of men, and women as well, can take root in the quiet realm of the actual, in the otherwise muted gyrations of a people’s soul, Viajero (Wanderer) commands by far a true power of the false.[iii] This we say as the novel, another tour de force by National Artist F. Sionil Jose, brings the whole weight of a people’s history, a power, strangely enough, nurtured by a difficult forbearance of a happy witness, to bear upon a future to come.

But for the future to surface on the horizon of things in their making possible the experience of the time of things, including what exceeds the givenness of their time as things, as time always surprises, the future must first be witnessed. As always, to be a witness is to carry a burden. Such is how the tectonic fluidity of the novel unleashes its force—by invoking a people who do not exist yet, a people as witness to the actualization of a power to falsify the present.

This is for us the unmistakable stamp of the novel. Viajero is a modern tale of ghosts and a narrative of a people whose lives, if still fortunate to cling to life, do not matter for non-people, for the life-nullifying impersonalism of the machine of history whose evil contraption is, in all times, inimitably of the creation of the powers that be. But these lives matter for a novel about zombies. A novel about them is right to the point if it shows a people embracing life in the squalid margins of modern urban landscapes, in the fringes of countryside topography whose tectonic origins underneath its soil are consigned to the unconscious of official history. These are people deprived even of animal decency, what of the esteemed dignity of a spore in these days of genetic mutation! And yet, just as in any mundane Platonic cave, a dreamer would escape.

Such is Salvador Raza, yet a dreamer who is never attached to a dream in a manner that dreamers dream, that it is they who make dreams intelligible, plain, lucid, logical; that an object of vision must first be afflicted by a soul if it is to become an image of thought, a rhizome,[vi] but rather it was a dream that found him. Out of this inversion of dream-dreamer, vision-actor binarity, Buddy emerges as an inadvertent seed that would promise at first to grow into a new arboreal structure of a living history.

In a historical sculpture in progress, such as Viajero, this talk about trees is not a strange addition to their symbolic function: from the canopy of trees where the laid-back stream of sunlight affords a sliver of hope despite the war’s hostility—the orphaned child Badong blinded by the rays of light before emerging from a dream to another, from one’s caring hands to the next, from place to place, from one geography to a distant one, from sunlight to sunlight where nighttime shadows shift in unsinkable diurnal because the revolution must not sleep—to the wistful sunshade of extendable history, an antique shop of memories that can be relived but only in the margins of the present. The list could go on: wood materials for shipbuilders in Cavite, ballasts for Spanish war machines, cannons, etc., mighty contraptions sustaining a trans-Pacific trade.

There is something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the people. [viii]

And yet in their place, a rhizome returns to the earth.

to be continued

Endnotes

[iii] According to Deleuze, Nietzsche speaks of the power of the false, being the other quality of will to power, as “a quality through which the whole of life and its quality is particularly affirmed and has become active” (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 185). “To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives. To affirm is to unburden; not to load life with the burden of higher values, but to create new values which are those of life, which make life right and active” (Ibid.).

[vi] That is to say, “stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizoprenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis, London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987], 12).

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This paper will build on the rhizomatic intricacies of a cartography of a people in Southeast Asia in James Scott’s (2009) description of the stateless inhabitants of Zomia, arguably lawless peoples whose migration from island assemblages in the region was caused by early 20th century ‘state-making projects’, oppression and colonialism. These peoples to this day still exist in a region assembled by mountain ranges the size of Western Europe.

Escaping state-making projects and their concomitant use of war machines is the imprint of a people who in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Deleuze and Guattari liken to abstract art: ‘Multidirectional, with neither inside nor outside, form nor background, delimiting nothing, describing no contour, passing between spots or points, filling a smooth space.’ The peoples of Zomia, nonetheless, are prone, much more in these days, to ecological catastrophe that in all likelihood Deleuze must have in mind when he speaks of the earth’s dynamic transformation in terms of ‘the general distribution of continents, the states of the seas, and lines of navigation’ (Desert Islands) which could have sparked a flurry of migrations, especially in Southeast Asia, drowned by melting polar glaciers during the Last Glacial Maximum. If the peoples of Zomia were compelled to escape what was in general the threat of war machines, how about in this age of ecological threat?

The paper will try to revisit Deleuze and Guattari’s work in cartography in order to arrive at a new post-anarchistic understanding of what is now at stake in the model of Zomia as a rhizomatic achievement of abstract machines, which to us remains a potent diagram of a people to come, especially in view of the apocalyptic threat of the new ecological order.

Text of the abstract accepted for presentation by the organizers of the Second International Deleuze Studies Conference in Asia to be held this time in Osaka University, Japan from June 6 to June 8, 2014.This is my second international engagement on Deleuze Studies in Asia. Long live Deleuze!

I would like to begin here with a quote from Gilles Deleuze who has been a true inspiration, at least for me. Here is the quote:

“Literature consists in inventing a people who aremissing” (Essays Critical and Clinical).

In many ways, these words resonate in today’s challenge for contemporary philosophy, a challenge that philosophy nonetheless cannot take without also committing itself to a certain kind of deliverance.

But what is this deliverance?

In a manner of speaking, it is deliverance from thought and an entry into the world of the non-thought where everything that is shaped by thought and language by extension falls flat. But it is also in that new world, in the empty space of thinking, of speaking and writing, that everything can start a new process of creation, a new literature, a new consciousness of earth and ocean, which in all known histories of civilization has always been responsible for the birth of a new people.

Incidentally, the beginnings of an ever-changing humankind are always willed by mythologies, by that movement of imagination that creates a void, a vacuüm to fill in if only to separate the past from the present, and by so doing, a process of creation unfolds, ex nihilo. But it is also in this light that the movement of imagination can go wrong in which case Deleuze’s warning in Desert Islands is a compelling reminder:

At the same time, this movement of imagination is subject to those human conditions that make mythology possible. Mythology is not simply willed into existence, and the peoples of the earth quickly ensured they would no longer understand their own myths. It is at this very moment literature begins. Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them or reproduce them. Literature is the competition of misinterpretations that consciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes.

Here, the unconscious is the force behind why a people succeed or fail, the unconscious as a literary contest of misinterpreting the myths ‘we no longer understand, since we no longer know how to dream them and reproduce them.’ Incidentally, aesthetics has provided an opportunity for this literary contest to immortalize a failure; aesthetics as a misinterpretation of the unconscious force of creation. In a manner of speaking, the way we appreciate literature as an art form, or the way we blur the distinction between imagination and reality, between its form and content, has distinguished ourselves as a people.

I am referring here to aesthetics as seen by proponents of high culture as a matter of taste and judgment, and not as a matter of pursuing a new origin and by implication of a new people’s consciousness; in the language of Deleuze, a prototype of a collective soul. This proto-consciousness is also an aesthetics but a non-standard one, averse to standard taste and judgement, that which does not serve an exemplary causality such as standardized forms of sensibility, of taste and judgement. It is in this context where Deleuze, this time in tandem with Guattari, describe a people as a model of non-standard aesthetics in the form of abstract art:

Hence, Deleuze and Guattari refer to a people as an abstract machine. As an abstract machine a people is indiscernible to standardized and hegemonic controls of sensibility, of promoting standard taste and judement. It is also in this sense that a people is in itself a power of the false (Cinema 2), in a manner of speaking, of the falsification of aesthetics. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari were not misled into thinking that this people exist in the present. To them this people are still missing, hence, the role of literature to invent them, to summon them, and educate them of the prize of absorbing too much aesthetics in their heads in the sense we described above.

In our history as a people, we get what we deserve for our failure to dream, to reproduce and understand those myths that created us as a people. This failure is what we mean by aesthetics. And its prize has acquired a very consistent form, the consistency of our nation’s tragic betrayal. Quoting from his essay in Philippine Star, National Artist F. Sionil Jose has this to say:

Behind this tragic failure is betrayal — we betray one another — and most of all, we betray ourselves, our ideals, our morality.

Look back: Diego Silang was betrayed. The revolution of 1896 was betrayed by the Pact of Biak-na-Bato — and earlier, Bonifacio was betrayed; and in turn, Aguinaldo was betrayed as well.

In more recent times, today, we are constantly betrayed by political charlatans. (F. Sionil Jose, History as prison, and as liberation)

This is our history as a people, a people misinterpreting the myths that created us. If this is also the history of how aesthetics has held us in submission to protocols of taste and judgement, of satisfaction and enjoyment, in the guise of today’s capitalist culture industry, it is time that we take heed of literature, still a work in progress, and its challenge to standard aesthetics.

It is time we invent ourselves as a people, as embodiment of non-standard aesthetics, as abstract machine, a people as a true work of art.

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Text of my welcome remarks read during the Philosophy Circle of the Philippines Panel Discussion on the theme ‘Aesthetics, Oppression, Justice’ held at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines on February 28, 2012.

I was thinking of forwarding a comment to Adam Robbert’s post at knowledge-ecology.com (Earth’s Aesthetics: Knowledge and Media Ecologies) about his concept of mapping ecology when for some reasons my mind wandered off into Guattari. Nonetheless, I find Robbert’s concept of mapping ecology reminiscent of Guattari’s cartography, though some obvious lines are drawn in Robbert’s that make his initial work considerably way above Guattari’s emphasis on decomposing oedipal desire which, though radical in its gesture, is still dependent on a residual humanistic framing as we will try to illustrate.

Well, this has been a part of the project I’m pursuing, to make sense of the anthropocene about accommodating the apocalypse as a properly post-human standpoint. Accommodation would need designing an anthropocenic apocalypse whose conceptualizations were already implied in pre-anthropocenic models (pre- in terms of before the awareness of what Morton describes as hyperobjects, or the awareness of our enormous influence on geological evolution since the last two hundred years or so). This will implicate modernist paradigms but also post-modernist paradigms as pre-anthropocenic. I am thinking of the direction of post-continental philosophy today as an ongoing foray into the anthropocenic proper in terms of formulating a model of designing the apocalypse of our time. Roughly stated, the apocalypse of our time is one whose requirement is no longer critical (or the business of critique that Kant started), finding the limit, critiquing it, and developing devices to stay within the limit, but rather a post-critical, post-cartographic engagement in terms of performing the limit that humanity has set upon itself since the advent of Enlightenment. This is somehow similar to Latour’s call to arms, to become modern which, among others, necessarily entails that we decompose the knowledge of the limit, centralized in nerve centers or ecologies of knowing and have it made available for a compositional performance (not mastery which requires control) of limit. But above all, this will entail a decomposition of the ‘subject’ that has been the most efficient operator of pre-anthropocenic models of designing the apocalypse, one of which is to protect this ‘subject’ from external danger in terms of providing a map, say, an opportunity for second creation or a serialization (which of course depends on the assumption that the earth will not betray us, a sort of vitalism).

Guattari’s mapping is particularly instructive for us as it provides us key approaches to locating the position of the subject that in Althusserian terms is always interpellated by ideology. Guattari’s schizoanalytic cartography aims to position the subject outside of the totalization of ideology (which operates on the unconscious level) and capital (a stumbling block to intensive flow of desire) by providing the subject of desire a cartography of ins and outs, circuits and flows, exits to creation and deterritorialization, which ideology and capital obstruct by stratifying, denying possibilities of second creations. For Guattari, the best model of this cartographic project is the arts or the way the arts emphasize the process of creating and not of pursuing a goal.[i] The emphasis on process raises a challenge to anthropological biases that have defined human progress since the last two centuries which celebrate goal-oriented activities at the expense of process as an autonomous molecular flow.

In light of the threat of ecological extinction, Guattari’s cartography can be extended to mapping geological possibilities of forging what Morton says of relationship with hyperobjects now poised to dominate the initial phase of what climate science describes as the sixth cycle of mass extinction. Nonetheless, schizoanalytic cartography is limited to flows of desire which are still human-oriented. If anything, geology only serves as the background of nomadic serialization of individual autonomy and its desire to deterritorialize the landscape that capitalism is fast transforming into a system vulnerable to chaos. If there is one singular lesson we can obtain from climate change it is that desire (which traverses the human and animal distribution of difference) is no longer a key object of investigation. If this is really the case, the focus now shifts into the otherwise than human, more specifically, the material vitality of non-human congregation enmeshed in networks of hyperobjects interacting as actants.

Still, Guattari’s transversal approach towards the subject’s autonomy (weaned off the Cartesian influence) provides us a model of the subject as performativity within a creative field of virtualization in which the very expression of performance constitutes its actuality. We contend that this kind of subject is amenable to human extinction just as it is already performing a kind of subjectivity as post-human in terms of allowing itself, just as any artistic subjectivity, to blend with the flows of the non-human, of objects and things populating the strata of known creation.[ii] If not by mixing herself with the flows then by “[throwing] an aesthetic dimension into the mix, causing the materials to engage with each other.”[iii] Guattari calls this subject ‘machinic’ (indeed, post-human) insofar as a machine works in a network of relationality. The ‘human’ is an appropriate description for the Cartesian (modified by Kant); a subject that suppresses relationality in the extent to which it despises the machine which cannot operate without the participation of other machines. Participation is to the machine; introspection is to the calculating subject of modernity.

This is where actor-network theory becomes an important contribution to designing the apocalypse. We are here capitalizing on the non-hierarchical emphasis of actor-network theory or its modern conception of flat ontology in which all beings are actants and as actants they differ just the same in terms of their modes of influencing one another, a process of negotiation, blending, mixing, or getting in the mix in the sense of adaptation and complimentarity.

What actor-network theory can improve in schizoanalytic cartography is its theory of the subject which is rather limited to a conception of human as undergoing changes whose cause is largely of another human making (capitalism). But climate change, though for the most part caused by human activity (anthropocene), threatens to break the causation of change by extinction. What lies at the end of the anthropocene is not human but arguably post-human. Unlike schizoanalytic cartography which still entertains the hope of another order where post-humans could thrive (Marx’s species-being), post-cartography is offering humanity a chance to flourish in an order without a world. This is different from the ordering world or the capitalist world order that Guattari is challenging.

But unlike Kant who offered humanity a way to live without a world (because ultimately the world, that which exists outside of cognition, is unknowable) by assuming a different world (the moral world) populated by values and not by objects of experience, such as Morton’s hyperobjects, post-cartography (similar to Latour’s interobjectivity) encourages us to abandon the moral world that is the kind of world that thrives in anthropological prejudices; in a nutshell, humans taking charge of objects by investing values in them because they could not speak for themselves. It is in this light that Guattari’s cartography remains within the fold of the moral by challenging a moral hegemony in terms of creating new (human) values. The post-human sense we can therefore obtain from Guattari’s cartographic project is simply ‘another-human’, presumably, better than the moral hominid. Needless to say, this is perfectly intelligible in a Kantian world. Donna Haraway offers an ethical alternative, cognizant of the Kantian trap, of “caring for entanglement, learning the art of paying attention”—a multi-critter thinking, patterned after the critter relating to its own environment.[iv]

But that is no longer the case with the anthropocene (to designate the assemblages of ecological threats). The post-human that is already this humanity is being prepared for an appropriate kind of dwelling without a world. The challenge is to make sense of being deprived of a promise of another world. The aim is to design a better apocalypse by performing the apocalypse of our time. In this light, designing the apocalypse of our time would mean making extinction actual, here and now.

[i] It is in this sense that Guattari speaks of a new aesthetic paradigm: “The aesthetic power of feeling, although equal in principle with the other powers of thinking philosophically, knowing scientifically, acting politically, seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective Assemblages of enunciation of our era” (Felix Guattari, “A New Aesthetic Paradigm,” in Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis [Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995], 101).

[ii] This I think is well summarized as follows: “I am once my body proper…the build environment I inhabit… my creative ideas… and the relations between those three elements. In Guattari’s mapping of subjectivity, there is a continual interplay between content, that which is represented (an idea, a concept, a physical body, lived space and its representation or expression… (Stephen Luis Vilaseca, “Felix Guattari and urban cultural studies,” in Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, 3 [2014],140)”

Like a dream you fade.An extra mile under your wings.About the place there’s not muchYour poetry can tell:There will be tourists, I suppose;Spiders dreaming of citiesMarching behind a comet’s tail;Ghosts from ancient ruins.Only you have an extra mile.Unlike them you knew where to bury your wings.Yours will be a short journey.To a poet-mentor Alfredo O. Cuenca, Jr(April 2, 1937–December 25, 2013)

To followers of this blog and to blogs that keep this blog blazing life lines may a thousand plateaus bear for you new myths of second creations, grow roots as you move along, will everything but the ascetic, and bind the loss of worlds with the promise that every newborn brings…

In one word, freedom, this is the secret to Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy. We agree with this except for the uncanny side Kant made freedom to perform. For purposes of this post, I will call this ‘substance abuse.’

I.

Certainly the Copernican gesture of changing the way we look at things, a perspectival shift from ‘knowledge conforming to objects’ (arguably, the legacy of the dogmatism of Ptolemaic theory) to ‘objects conforming to cognition’ (the advent of a new science treading along a secure path) already reveals a secret—that the arbitrariness of changing the focus is not legislated by any a priori of reason. It is freedom as pure performativity which precedes the act of freely arriving at the a prioris of pure reason. Nonetheless, and in spite of appearances, freedom, even for Kant, does not possess an absolute founding character (more on this later). It is not difficult to argue here that as performance freedom is a non-intellectual value, an act that is not conceivable within the a prioris. The question that comes up immediately is whether freedom precedes the determinism of the a prioris or is revealed rather later as a consequence of applying the a prioris to objects of experience which for Kant necessitates that reason annuls itself. Simply put, the pure exercise of pure reason (intellectual or theoretical) succumbs to the unknowable which can only be approached by means of the practical use of pure reason.

As we emphasized in our earlier post, everything has to be given first to cognizability before ‘everything’ takes the form of the thinkability or transparency of appearing. Freedom as antecedent can only be revealed retroactively from the standpoint of pure reason. Yet, even as antecedent freedom has to be intrinsically cognizable which illustrates how Kant held on to the correlation between cognition and the cognizability of being as a permanent correlation. It must be cognizable; otherwise the retroactive standpoint of pure reason would fall under its own weight. Retroaction demands that the object of its examination must conform to its a priori demands. (That much can be said of how Kant defended the dogmatic procedure of knowledge without falling into dogmatism). Beyond this correlation freedom is non-existent.

But freedom exists, in fact, allowed by Kant to exist rather as a metaphysical postulate only that its certainty as knowledge is questionable from the standpoint of pure reason. Kant’s project is to investigate how such postulate could exist without legislation (of the a prioris). We learn from Kant that the key to unlocking the secret to this absurdity is a natural disposition. We are all predisposed to do metaphysics before the work of pure reason could initiate a reverse engineering. This engineering technique is cognitive and retroactive. In contrast, for a natural, that is, unlearned metaphysician, his belief in God is not achieved by any retroactive procedure, rather by simple and absolute performance. He performs God in the very act of performing his belief which makes God actual for him. Performing God is performing a natural metaphysics by non-intellectual means. In spite of appearances, however, Kant would not allow that this is an exercise of freedom on the part of the natural metaphysician for a natural metaphysician is simply ignorant of the cognizable condition on the level of reason’s practical use of the possibility of God! The level of his ignorance is such that it yields high risk of insanity which arguably treats freedom as transcendent to the givenness of limitation in which reality (or reality principle) breaks down (more on this).

Even so, insofar as the experience of God by an unlearned or pre-critical metaphysician does not need the precondition of cognizability of God for God to become an object of experience in the metaphysical sense, freedom actually precedes the a prioris of reason. He knows God exists because his belief is capable of moving him (close to Kierkegaard’s notion of subjectivity is actuality). This runs counter to the unknowability of the object of experience from the standpoint of the pure exercise of pure reason which can only allow itself to reduce an object of experience to its thinkability but not its knowability. Hence, a natural metaphysician is actually capable of knowing an object of experience by alone utilizing the practical side of pure reason. Though even at this point that he is performing something that he is not actually free to do so he is ignorant that he deploys the a prioris of reason. The poor fellow is actually predetermined. Like it or not, even an unlearned man has a prioris in his mind!

Indeed, the condition of possibility of a metaphysical postulate such as God is the annulment of the a prioris of pure reason (though, again, the poor believer is ignorant that his is an act of annulment). Someone like Kant has to tell our poor fellow that he is not actually experiencing an object of experience but simply believing he experiences the non-experienceable. But with uncanny twist, a natural metaphysician can unlearn his ignorance or his predisposition to dogmatic metaphysics if he learns the a prioris that for Kant actually condition his belief. (On hindsight, Kant himself was awakened from his dogmatic slumber).This is the kernel of what we described beforehand as substance abuse. What follows is our elaboration:

Let us administer an a priori ‘pill’ to a natural metaphysician. When the drug kicks in our guinea pig will be transported to a dimension in the past when he could see how he was not actually being himself when he was at his best self. The drug works as a liberator of ignorance. But the wonder of the pill is more than that. It actually allows the subject of the experiment an experience of the redoubtable—that with the pill he can experience freedom. This time freedom loses its metaphysical character. It becomes a permissible experience of metaphysics, a critical act. There metaphysics is liberated from natural disposition—a post-human metaphysics.

No sooner than reality barges in after the expiration of the pill another pill must be administered. Presumably this time it is the subject of the experiment asking for a much higher dose. It is precisely at this point when the subject becomes free, not anymore in the metaphysical sense, rather in the transcendental sense. The subject is now capable of explaining the possibility of metaphysics.

II.

We can also argue that this experiment also works for the Copernican revolution in philosophy initiated by Kant. The perspectival shift of the Copernican is not dictated by the a priori rather by freedom. Freedom is not an apriori but performance. We have covered this already. Nonetheless we can extend the argument.

As performance however pure reason has no concept for it. Let us say it is pure sensibility, pure affect, without which no object can be experienced (‘thoughts without contents are blind’). Kant would further his argument in terms of introducing another correlation between intuition and concept—intuitions without concepts are empty. From the latter correlation we can obtain the conception that freedom (which is the result of the intuition of time and space initially producing an awareness of boundaries and limitations in which alone freedom can operate) cannot be actually free until it is given to cognizability or to the categories of understanding. So far this is Copernican—actuality is produced by the a prioris being made to reduce objects to conforming to reason. Yet we all know that as a consequence of Kant’s Newtonian view of science objects cannot of their own making conform to cognition. Objects are inert in a Newtonian universe. Cognition must rather make objects behave according to its designs which correspond to the categories of understanding. But, realistically speaking, this is only half-Copernican.

Recall here that freedom is what allowed the perspectival shift. It is not cognition that makes objects conform to it, rather something entirely non-cognitive, practical, to say the least. As we have emphasized in the preceding section, freedom has to be cognizable first before it can penetrate human understanding. Thus, what the Copernican revolution is all about is the cognizability of freedom to allow the perspectival shift to transform our scientific view of the world. And yet freedom is not an a priori for it to be cognizable. Even as a practical value, it cannot be recognized as performativity until the a prioris are suspended—in other words, the a prioris have to be first tested. They have to be there all along, at least, for Kant.

Nonetheless, the necessary presence of the a prioris does not prove anything. They cannot be assuming the necessary had not something entirely non-cognitive allowed their necessity. For purposes of consistency, the non-cognitive that we are referring here must not be a part of pure reason (its practical side) otherwise freedom would lose its integrity as that which purely allows the perspectival shift, a change of method of acquiring knowledge (from Ptolemaic to the Copernican) precisely because it would simply be the other side of pure reason, yet the same pure reason allowing its other side to maintain its self-coherence, calling the shots. Thus, there is no point to the assumption that the change of perspective initiated by Copernicus in science (and extended to philosophy by Kant) is made possible by the pure exercise of freedom, not reason, either intellectual or practical, rather by pure willing, or the will to truth that is irreducible to cognition and the cognizability of its practical value.

But to insist that it is pure willing would entirely belie Kant’s Copernican revolution. Certainly in the sense of will to truth Kant anticipates the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche accuses him of endorsing beneath his famous exhortation to dare use the full powers of reason. In a nutshell, the ascetic (nihilistic) ideal means that with the collapse of reason (prefigured in Kant by the annulment of reason to give room for faith) only the will can provide comfort. Yet even the will has to be suspended for it was the will in the pure sense that encouraged the will to truth (the change of perspective from Ptolemy to Copernicus and now to the ever-increasing complexity of science that corresponds to the complexity of its objects of study) that shattered the illusion of willing that truth is attainable. Nonetheless, in spite of appearances, the will itself must be saved, as Nietzsche speaks of the last resort of the ascetic (in On the Genealogy of Morals).

III.

I would like to end here with a question: Can we now say with utmost clarity (the dogmatic side of our position vis-à-vis Kant’s own) that to save the appearance of health, sanity and virtuous living, of necessity the ascetic must take substance abuse to a secure path?

A Rehearsal in Anti-correlationism

1. With mathematical proofs, for the first time, as Kant says, objects are made to conform to cognition. But if we pay close attention to this formulation the success of mathematics not only lies in objects being made to conform to a cognitive design but also, seemingly, in a pre-existing correlation between mind and object. That seems to be the revolution ignited by mathematical science, a revolution that would change the intellectual landscape of Europe that was long before divided between dogmatic and skeptical persuasions. This revolution however was more than what it had been acknowledge for.

2. If we are to radicalize this revolution in terms of the conditions of possibility of knowledge, mathematical science discovered the critical correlation between mind and object, and for there to be something like an objective conformity to mathematical proofs this correlation must pre-exist mathematics. Naively put, take away one term in the correlation and there would be no mathematical proof. So far that makes sense. But, in spite of appearances, this correlation exhibits a metaphysical tendency. Taken to its extreme, the pre-existing correlation between mind and object guarantees a certain positive telos to our quest for certainty. It may take time to achieve certainty but it is guaranteed by the correlation. But this telos is not only applicable to the future but much more to the past. Here, we can mention a certain intelligible design or the metaphysics of a pre-ordered cosmos.

3. For instance, what can we make of phenomena that preceded the advent of human intelligence? Certainly, there was no correlation in this dimension of the past when humans were yet to emerge in the planet. What about the Big Bang? What about the Nebulae theory of Kant (with Laplace) when certainly there was no human in the scene? By invoking the correlation in the investigation of past phenomena, we end up with the anthropic principle—that the universe is created such that it would evolve into a situation in which physical and organic conditions are ripe for the emergence of the human species. This is obviously metaphysical in the dogmatic sense—what appeared to be independent of all experiences, which is how we define metaphysics, suddenly becomes without explication dependent on human emergence. In other words, there is no metaphysics apart from the fact that human signification forces its realization into exclusive communicable codes.

4. Initially, this answers the question of the possibility of metaphysics. It was there all along, but, as Althusser would put it, reified. As a human disposition it was there already but whether it can lead to any real knowledge is questionable, especially, when a metaphysician does not acknowledge his self-generating power to do metaphysics, meaning, when he otherwise believes that metaphysics is independent of the immanent conditions of reasoning that can produce metaphysics. But only metaphysics can redeem itself from its pre-critical disposition, hence, the reason Kant calls his metaphysics critical. In other words, metaphysics cannot be deployed to understand the world itself but only how our own faculties deploy themselves in understanding and judging our own acts. This makes critical metaphysics a proper ethical discipline. Put in radical terms, however, the world is unknown to a self-understanding reason, that we cannot approach the world through the categories of reason. Now, there’s the rub.

5. We cannot understand the world but can will a world instead that will have to be unknown to reason granting that Kant is right about the world resistant to human categories. In the final analysis, the correlation between mind and world or nature or anything outside the mind holds tight in Kant. There has to be an unknown world for there to be a cognitive activity and this world has to be willed rather than understood. Let us say, in light of contemporary problems, there has to be climate change, an ungraspable phenomenon after all by virtue of its occurrence in the world that is resistant to human signification, for there to be such response as mitigation and reduction of carbon emissions. What this formulation neglects, aside from the absurdity it conveys, is that by rendering the world unknown we deny our contribution to how this world turns out to be. We cannot know if our carbon emissions are really changing the physical laws of the planet. Does this amount to stating that we have all the reasons to deny that climate change is happening and that it is happening because of the way we have treated the world as unresponsive to human acts? The culprit in this form of climate change denial is the presupposition that humans must will a world according to how they structure their minds, and they have obviously structured their minds in such a way that the world is for the mind a potential for metaphysics to become dogmatic in terms of applying metaphysics to the world. (This prefigures the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche attributed to Kant—the subtle but dangerous denial of the world). But the consequence of not applying metaphysics to the world reveals a more dangerous tendency: the world is turned into an unresponsive hyperobject which puts the blame of climate change on the world itself by not being responsive to human abuse which could have otherwise rechanneled human inertia into to a more desirable direction. The world becomes a hyperobject in proportion to how it is blown out of proportion by giving it incredible substances and properties such as would fit the cognitive construction of a world indifferent to human values. Here, we can see the danger of Kantian correlation that puts much premium on the subject which alone can mobilize the correlation such as between mind and object.

6. Another problematic value we can detect in the Kantian correlation is, where there is a mind objects can be made to become part of a cognitive design which makes objects belong to nature. The reason I mention nature here has something to do with the function of mathematics to science. Through mathematics, science can naturalize objects in terms of determining them as a prioris of the mathematical mind, which is also a scientific mind. Through mathematical proofs science can make objects belong to a domain called Nature that, in spite of appearances, is constructed by man, contrary to the prevailing claim that Nature is non-constructible by man. There is a particular man invoked here, that is, the mathematical or scientific man, not man in the universal sense. But this man is also a metaphysical term in the dogmatic sense for it conceals its particularity in mathematical and scientific activity. Taking Heidegger’s cue, this is no less a metaphysics of subjectivity.

7. Another metaphysical value we can identify with these mathematical and scientific endeavours (as Kant understood them) has something to do with how through mathematics science constructs Nature. There is no Nature to begin with other than what science can determine of objects that conform to its idea of what constitutes Nature. Science can determine objects as prioris in a constructible domain of Nature in the sense of naturalizing them. What we obtain here is a politics of nature, or naturalizing Nature by non-natural means, not Nature, say, as wilderness or untamed. We can say this is metaphysical in the sense that we are led to believe that Nature is an objective phenomenon, totally apart from human signification or construction. In this light, there is the Heideggerian sense of concealment.

8. But, and this goes through the heart of Heidegger’s concept of aletheia: what gets unconcealed or really discovered in the process of scientific naturalization of objects are those objects which cannot be placed under scientific experiment guided by empirical and theoretical principles, after much scientific work is done. These unconcealed objects challenge the a prioris of scientific mind. For instance, what about objects of nature such as those produced by a mysterious leap of genetic mutation? These molecular objects are produced by sheer chance and accident. They cannot become part of the constructible design of scientific a prioris. By all means it is an Event, that is to say, it is unpredictable. Hence, they escape the categories of understanding or the a priori principles of reason.

9. Most crucially, concerning the status of objects, what becomes of the debris or waste materials generated by scientific experiments, and those by technological and economic production spurred by scientific advancement? As waste or toxic materials, are they still part of the constellation of objects determined by science as belonging to Nature? When these toxic materials penetrate the earth’s crust, they are assuming the function of Nature in the sense that they are determining the laws of life on earth, but no longer Nature as it were for they are not induced by Nature understood as that which stands apart from humans capable of doing science that is capable of naturalizing Nature. Certainly, they are induced through the uncanny concept of scientific Nature extended into technological and biopolitical forms of inventing Nature to be harnessed for human ends. Now, the question we raise for Kant—what is the reality of this Nature he is talking about when he mentions mathematics and science as determinative of objects of Nature according to certain definable a prioris?

10. But it is more complicated than that. The necessary dualism that is invoked by science in constructing Nature from not-yet-constructible Nature, or the Alien Other that is yet to penetrate the language of science through placing this Other under scientific experiment by means of validating and nullifying a given hypothesis, becomes non-functional in the sense that the real dualism that is secretly invoked by science is to be found rather within a self-dividing act of the scientific mind. In other words, the scientific mind traverses both the constructible and the not-yet-constructible. But the not-yet-constructible is also given in advance by a constructing mind of science or what belongs to Nature not-yet. This not-yet Nature is illegitimate until science can make objects in the not-yet conform to what is intelligible based on a given set of a prioris. In the final analysis, there is no dualism between mind and Nature, or between phenomena and noumena, from the objective or non-subjective standpoint. But this standpoint is impossible. No science can occupy an external objective standpoint. There is only dualism from a strictly subjective standpoint. Hence, there are no real objects to begin with. The radical implication of which is to deny climate change, for instance. What is climate change if not the phenomenon of objects asserting they are real? That is to say, real in the sense that they cannot be tamed by the categories of reason.

Postscript

In light of our ecological crisis, this calls for a new approach to objects. But there are only real subjects, arguing from what we can radicalize of Kant. Again, back to the metaphysics of subjectivity.

These nomadic people, arguably from Austronesian descent, will know how to rebuild their lives from the ruins as had their ancestors during the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago when villages were drowned by melting polar glaciers.

My father’s town is now barely recognizable, his place of origin, a place that taught him how to swim. No one in the town was a stranger to the sea; they knew of sea monsters, strange creatures frolicking behind the sea crests, outlines on a bubbly, treacherous canvass of a moonlit Pacific that is home to pearls. Finding their ways on plateaus to create a people whose myths were those of pearls, tectonic treasures of molten memories buried deep beneath the roaring earth, these pearls inspired ferment, revolutions, music and poetry of resistance against all types of war machines of the great Atlantic dream. Shy of accepting defeat in a face-to-face combat against the natives, once, the Americans scorched the entire region, rendering the soil unfit for agriculture for decades to come. Faced with the wrath of either glaciers or hellish contraption, the natives nonetheless proved their resilience. They were nomadic.

Looking at the pictures of destruction wreaked by Yolanda, I wonder if my father would have a word to say—against imperial America, against the waves, against the looters of his town’s treasures feeding up the global rich who, with the help of native elites, then and now, continue to conspire against their remaining wealth, their bodies, surpluses of biopower that fuel the machines of global capital. Economists call these surpluses ‘domestic helpers’. Indeed, when economy has something to say about a person’s character by the intensity she can offer, it is when economy traces its genealogy in morals. Most of my relatives (who were at one point employed as OFWs) living in the region however choose to ignore the label. (I haven’t heard from them since after the devastation). It is something they are neither proud nor shameful. Nomadic bloods running in their veins, these people are ardent believers in the economy to come. For the time being let things run their course. All that is solid will soon melt into thin air.

I heard a story from a survivor of Bohol earthquake, weeks before Yolanda, that people were seeing ghostly strangers. It was not difficult to detect who is a neighbour or stranger in a town galvanized by a myth. But a stranger has a role to perform (the stranger as a performative principle)—to warn of the unpredictable. These apparitions were complemented by animal cries at night that they were mistaking for those of creatures whose existence they only learned from legends and myths—whatever cry they could make, these creatures have only been in existence in as far as people could divine an acoustic image. Apparitions and acoustic image—both warn of the coming of the unspeakable, of the aneconomy, of the amoral, the epiphany of an ancient formerity. The myth as a leveling political imaginary.

But this time we have to arm this myth with the weapon of the speculative, a myth folded, redoubled. With a power to heal and forget—we will have to forge a new myth, create a new island, a new people, a new consciousness of earth and ocean, a new second creation.

As flood myths have always taught people of deserted islands, creating a new myth will have to be preceded by a leveling cataclysm, not to mention a new people’s consciousness — in the words of Deleuze, radical and absolute (Desert Islands). It is in this sense that a power to heal and forget can be lethal. Beware, defenders of moral economy!

The story began with Kant faulting Leibniz for assimilating metaphysics to analytic judgments, even as he criticized Hume for failing to radicalize the germinal concept of the possibility of synthetic a priori (See Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason [London and New York, 1999], 138).

For Kant, against Leibniz and Hume, metaphysics is an example of synthetic a priori, and more than that, it is possible as a valid form of knowledge not just what is blindly presupposed in habit. But what exactly is the status of its possibility?

Recall here that the problematic of the synthetic a priori concerns an impasse concerning which is a valid starting point, the synthetic or the analytic. The possibility of synthetic a priori must therefore exceed the synthetic-analytic distribution. Relying on Dieter Heinrich’s legendary lectures on Kant, Slavoj Zizek takes us into an adept summary of what is going on with Kant who is here facing a dilemma (the italicized words were quoted by Zizek from Heinrich):

“Kant starts with a cognitive capacity–the Self with its three features (unity, synthetic activity, emptiness) is affected by noumenal things and, through its active syntheses, organizes impressions into phenomenal reality; however, once he arrives at the ontological result of his critique of knowledge (the distinction between phenomenal reality and the noumenal world of Things-in-themselves), ‘there can be no return to the self. There is no plausible interpretation of the self as a member of one of the two worlds.” This is where practical reason comes in: the only way to return from ontology to the Self is via freedom: freedom unites the two worlds and provides for the unity or coherence of the Self–this is why Kant repeated the motto again and again, ‘subordinate everything to freedom’” (Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism [London and New York: Verso, 2012], 266); also, Dieter Heinrich, Between Kant and Hegel. Lectures on German Idealism, ed. David S. Pacini [Cambridge, Massachusetts, London and England: Harvard University Press, 2003, 52).

The impossibility of returning to the self in the final analysis requires a decision: the decision arises from the impossibility of deciding, so to speak. Until the self decides it is practically a ghost but that does not necessarily mean the self loses a body. The self is still embodied but as such is also vulnerable to external appropriation. This is the vulnerability that the ascetic ideal (the subject of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals) takes advantage of, the body-self. (We will return to this aspect later).

II. Kant’s resurrection of the ascetic ideal

Kant resurrects the ascetic ideal through – this is quite familiar now – a correlationist strategy. We will find out what the real function of correlationism is to Kant’s oft-repeated call to “subordinate everything to freedom.”

Meillasoux (2007) defines correlationism as follows: “Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another” (Quentin Meillasoux, After Finitude. An Essay on Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier [London: Continuum, 2008], 8).

What this amounts to is simple if we consider the relation between subject and object, or Man and the world whose relational form partakes of a more elementary or primary model, that is, as always a relation of sort. Relations are absolutely primary, and there are only relations – so far, this is the metaphysical kernel of correlationism. This, for a good reason, destroys the unrelational nature of the metaphysics of substance. But, having destroyed metaphysics in this sense, correlationism generates a new form of metaphysics, that is, the metaphysics of relation; psychologically put, the absolute necessity of belongingness, of a shared relationship. This has indeed a very useful therapeutic function – one is assured that he is not alone. Indeed, as Nietzsche says, nihilism has deep psychological roots. (But this is not the ultimate cause of nihilism).

Meillasoux adds: “[Ever] since Kant, to discover what divides rival philosophers is no longer to ask who has grasped the true nature of substantiality, but rather who has grasped the more originary correlation” (Ibid.). This brings us to Kant’s maxim “subordinate all to freedom.”

The trick is the exceptionalist metaphysics of a philosopher who wills himself to grasp a correlation. Hence, freedom exceeds the correlation. Kant had to set up the problem of correlation to replace the old substantialist problem only to affirm what substantialism affirmed all along (though negatively), namely, that someone or a subject wills a substance (God in old metaphysics; Man for Kant).

But still for Kant the Man-category is derivative of self-critique, that it is only by self-critique that Man as a subject can exist as subject in reality. This is where Nietzsche faulted Kant. The Kantian self-critique is ultimately a critique of pre-critical, pre-modern values (both in theology and philosophy, especially those influenced by Cartesianism). In Nietzschean terms, this is expressed by way of confronting the question head-on: Does a critique of values have a value of its own (GM, Preface 6)? Or, who will undertake the critique of morality? Here morality collapses the distinction between theology and philosophy understood as both pre-critical and still pre-modern despite Descartes.

More so, because it also concerns values, the question of the value of critique of values is no less a critique of moral economy (all morals are economic as all of economics is morality). If Man continues to be reactive (in the Nietzschean sense, as Deleuze pointed out to us in Nietzsche and Philosophy) because it remains hostage to pre-critical morality (theology and philosophy, and, economics, altogether in the Kantian sense), then what right has Man to undertake the critique? Who is this Man? What exactly must this Man have to secure the right to carry out the critique?

Nietzsche saw the answer in the ascetic ideal which is associated with a more familiar Nietzschean concept, the death of God, roughly the collapse of meaning or value of existence whose most representative proponent is the ascetic.

The ascetic is the Man of Kant, in short. But there are at least two types of ascetic: the pre-critical ascetic (theologian, philosopher, and economist or moral economist as well) and critical ascetic (presumably one who has followed the Critiques to the last words, at the ready to subordinate the pre-critical to freedom).

Freedom is the modern Man-category that will carry out the critique of values of the pre-critical. In short, the critical ascetic is charged by Kant with the responsibility to carry out the critique.

This expresses the whole project of modernity as Nietzsche saw it, starting with Kant.

But there is always a twist.

III. Faith that is not commanded: Kant’s version of the ascetic ideal

The key to understanding this is the movement of the ascetic ideal from irrational or precritical terms of faith to “honest objective atheism” (GM, III 27). Kant could give us a lot of hints for the necessity of this transition, one of which is what follows from a subjective need to objective necessity:

“[The] principle which determines our judgement in this is the basis – subjectively indeed as a need, but simultaneously also as a means of furthering what is objectively (practically) necessary … This faith is therefore not commanded” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans, Werner S. Pluhar [Indiana/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002],184).

But we have never asked ourselves why the transition is in the first place necessary. (Incidentally, Kierkegaard opposed this objective transition apropos his famous maxim – ‘subjectivity is truth; subjectivity is actuality’; see Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 288).

For Nietzsche, the transition is caused no less by the death of God, which signals the rebirth of the ascetic ideal, the secret jouissance of the pre-critical moderns that God must die of necessity so that the true essence of the ideal can be finally expressed in absolute (modern) human terms. But the most revolutionary expression of the pre-modern jouissance lay centuries ahead.

This would be no less accomplished through conjuration that has a counterpart in sorcery – extracting a spirit from the cranium of the dead through which the dead is somehow resurrected in terms of a new object-relation (through the skull) to that which will never return as a subject-relation (the living body). Correlatively, the success of delivering faith from ignorance gives the conjurer-moralist the opportunity to restrain, to limit, even deny and suppress the vital power that by all means established the ascetic ideal even as it negates its true source. This ideal or the spirit of revenge (against the living) prospers by refocusing the attention from heaven to earth not out of fidelity to the earth, rather out of pity for it having lost the transcendent meaning that used to support this loyalty (GM, III 27).

Having rescued faith from its precritical condition, Kant gave the ascetic ideal a new lease on life which greatly contributes to the nihilism of modern times which has come full circle in terms of obscuring the ecological background of moral reason, which to us is the ultimate desire of the ascetic – the active denial of the earth. Therefore, the economic form of humiliating earth-values is no less an ‘ascetic’ ideal (as if we haven’t stressed the point that the economist is a moralist and vice versa).

In this light, what truly radicalizes Nietzsche’s genealogical project is its ultimate presupposition, that all morals have ecological roots.

Modernity: A Perverted Genealogical Hypothesis

Before concluding, let me offer an interpretation of Latour’s own concept of ‘we have never been modern’ through Nietzsche’s genealogical prism:

“Does one really in all seriousness still think (as the theologians deluded themselves for a while) that, for instance, Kant’s victory over the conceptual dogmas of theology (‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘freedom’, ‘immortality’) harmed [the] ideal? … What is certain is that, since Kant, all kinds of transcendentalists have once again won the day – they are liberated from the theologians: what luck! – Kant revealed to them the secret path along which they may from now on, in independence and with the greatest scientific respectability, pursue their ‘heart’s desire’ (GM, III 25).

As an anti-modernist Nietzschean, I understand Latour to be proposing this – the failure of modernity, or shy of the expression, corresponds to our awareness of what is at stake in the ascetic ideal – that it must not be allowed anymore to reproduce itself as Kant did when he delivered faith from its ignorance (its precritical condition), igniting the course of the modern phenomenon of the death of God as it revived the spirit of the ascetic who would have found in Kant’s Critiques the justification for an “objective, honest atheism,” yet a justification that must remain a secret lie. For Kant, as for the ascetic, God is an absolutely necessary concept. Interestingly, the commons must be guarded against the awareness of this hypothesis, against learning the ‘weakness of the god-postulate’ (parenthesizing Caputo), the postulate of the ascetic.

But we can also say that the modern ideal (of Kant) is absolutely illusory, which does not mean that the ascetic ideal which gives the modern ideal its most profound expression (the prototype of modern nihilism is the ascetic) has never historically occurred. Precisely, that is the point.

The ideal will always be in excess of what it can promise and will therefore not become actual in the sense that one can call it his own, or his own ‘time or age’, his ‘environment’, his ‘model’, his ‘origin’. (Age, environment, model, origin: these are the terms of Nietzsche’s genealogy [GM, Preface]). Here, we interpret excess in the sense Nietzsche speaks of “a perverted genealogical hypothesis” (GM, Preface) – the hypothesis of modernity.

“We have never been modern.” At least, our nihilism has never been irremissible. In a sense, Nietzsche credits the ascetic (though for sheer rhetorical purposes) for showing us the dangers of nihilism or the (Kantian modernist) Idea – so that, it makes sense to say, we can refuse to ‘become modern’, to become an idea. We think this is the exact kernel of Nietzsche’s fascination for the Presocratics – in his words, “the republic of geniuses from Plato to Socrates.”

Deleuze and Guattari have at least provided us an initial description of this power to negate the ascetic in their concept of rhizome, which extends Nietzsche’s concept of power to form and shape independent of the ends of truth, organization and finality, but also a power to heal and forget (to heal our contamination out of prolonged exposure to modernity; forget that we have become modern out of our inevitable relation to history). Later, Deleuze would develop this concept into that of the power of the false.

Terence Blake of terenceblake.wordpress.com makes an interesting comparison between Latour and Zizek, triggered by Adam Kotsko’s An Interview over Zizek at itself.wordpress.com. Below is my rather brief commentary on the comparative relation between Latour and Zizek.

I think in the end Latour’s conservatism will complement Zizek’s view of religion, though each differs in his approach towards what Zizek calls the Big Other (or God, if you will), if we look into how in the same manner Zizek proposes a more conservative treatment of the reality of the Oedipalized master that has died along with God (in this sense the death of God is the death of the Oedipal Father that paves the way for a more symbolic One, the master signifier). Zizek does not fully support autonomy in terms of withdrawing from the present order if we mean the present as a social symbolic that is individually or collectively localized in particular ways of appropriating the death of God, which by all means are ways also of appropriating a symbolic stand-in for the God (the Oedipal Father) that will never return. Zizek’s approach to the death of God is nothing new. Like Freud he proposes an end to mourning to give way to a more manageable melancholic attitude towards the Other by replacing that which will never return with an object-relation that serves as a stand-in, a memory simply put. In Lacan this memory is properly symbolic, hence, the social symbolic as a whole object-relation construction. It is here where Lacan’s conservatism is at its best. After a period of mourning the period of conservatism or willful recovery follows. Suffice it to say that it is in object-relations that society is enabled to survive despite the death of God.

It is important that we mention here Zizek’s criticism of Occupy movement where he repeats Lacan’s criticism of the student revolts of May 1968 by taking the Occupiers to task for their failure to create a sustainable community (sustainable in the psychoanalytic sense of preserving psychic energies that would have been otherwise utilized for more socially productive ends other than protesting). In other words, we must become aware of the logic of protest–it is simply symptomatic of our mourning for the death of God that despite the turn to object-relations is not completely appeased. Like the repressed it will find a way to reveal the cause of the symptom. Moreover, resistance or protest must be fully rationalized as to not bring the phantoms of the past back to the present (the Ur-phantom is of course the Father); instead, these phantoms must be sublated in the present such that it would no less appear that their mourning has found its proper culmination in the object-relation of the present. Here, Zizek combines the lessons of Hegel and Lacan.

But protests are also instructive if not edificatory for they sustain our relation to memory (the memory of the death of God). But just enough as to not turn us away from the reality of the everyday, or the reality of the mediation of object-relations that sustain our existence despite the lack of reason for existence. Something must remain untouched, a sacred, if you will. In this sense Latour does not withdraw from the present assuming the present is already the accomplished space of Freudo-Lacanian social symbolic that cannot anymore encourage another death. (Humanity has reached its utmost atmospheric limit in language which makes our last struggle atmospheric in nature [no less the anthropocene triggered by human intervention, for instance, in the atmosphere]). Zizek does not also withdraw from ‘this’ present assuming that the act of withdrawing is simply and nothing else but the act of pointing towards that which withdraws (Heidegger), or that which speaks of ‘end times’ (social entropy for Zizek), or that which today should allow for a cosmopolitan approach to the maximization of what’s left of solar entropy (Stengers, Latour; Sloterdijk, but also Lovelock, Crutzen). It is language that withdraws. Or, might one also say that it is withdrawing toward the last scene of Man which is now beginning to express itself independent of human pointing?

Over at Anarchist Without Content the following lines, from among the post’s helpful and penetrating insights, made me seriously reflect–“Hardt and Negri do not go as far as to call Empire an abstract machine, but perhaps we should.”

These are helpful lines on offer with the rest out there about the limitations of Hardt and Negri’s bestseller. But we should also bear in mind, if we follow Deleuze closely, that a people most consistently qualifies as an abstract machine.

In theory both state and people are capable of deterritorialization and reterritorialization though they differ in terms of the directions that these movements of immanent composition imposes on the two different modalities of abstract machine. On the one hand, the state aims at a principle of finality and organization via a skillful synchronization of these movements; on the other hand, a people can continue utilizing those movements or creative rhythms in search of never-ending virtuality.

It is a continuation of the classic contradiction between residentiality and nomadic itinerancy. But I also agree that with the changing dynamics of state determination, the residentiality aspect may no longer apply as a fixed, positive location of determination as today’s state has become more trans-residential, trans-national. Still, and all the more, when the state has transformed into a self-volatilizing power, it becomes ever more self-conscious of its power of abstraction (because it also increases the possibility of its implosion; one of the reasons why the state has to periodically sponsor a crisis, a breach of its immanent principle of organization, to deodorize or unclog its system). Hence, the urgency of challenging the concreteness of state determination from behind, via a sort of, as Anarchist Without Content puts it, non-empiricism. From behind: as the state increases its abstractive power the challenge of resisting it shifts the focus of exposition, opposition and construction from empiricality (which the state can easily evade by becoming more abstract) into the non-empiricality of resistance where the heart of state power resides, that is, in the actuality of its abstraction.

Unfortunately, we have never radicalized abstraction to such an extent that its real power as an abstract machine, a machine capable of grounding abstraction to a halt by emphasizing that real abstraction is allergic to finality and organization, hence, state determination is not abstractive enough) is utilized to its concrete oppositional force.

In a nutshell, I wish to emphasize here that the state or the trans-residential Empire has no real concrete abstractive power vis-à-vis a people as an abstract machine. As an abstract machine a people is the true force that is not extensive to any product because it first of all refuses labor as a positive production principle (a lesson from Berardi). A people has force and force only. It creates; it does not produce. In contrast to Anarchist Without Content‘s observation that “Empire operates through management and circulation, but it is not extensive with its products,” we are rather of the opinion that the Empire has products dependent on the labor that it creates by real subsumption, the labor as an organ/ization principle that it invests in a people, in principle, a body without organs. The Empire is bursting at the seams. The Empire is full because it has its products.

As a final note, I wish to state that as a creating non-producer a people can survive the implosion of the Empire. It can survive even by foraging on the waste of the Empire. By waste I mean the goods that the Empire cannot entirely carry on its own hands.

An extract of what I’ve blogged here has been accepted for presentation at the Deleuze Conference 2013 organized and sponsored by the School of Education, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia from December 9 to 11, 2013.

I just received the email announcement from the conference organizer Dr. Greg Thompson (who was also present during the First International Deleuze Studies Conference in Asia at Tamkang University, Taiwan, which I attended also for a parallel paper presentation, but never got the chance to rub elbows with).

“This conference is designed for theorists and practitioners working at the intersection of Deleuze, Guattari, Schizoanalysis and Education to share their work. We welcome papers addressing a broad range of issues relating to institutional education such as schools, universities, technical colleges and other institutions of higher education. We also welcome papers addressing the use of Deleuze, Guattari and their combined works in areas typically associated with mainstream education including pedagogy, teaching, learning, teacher education, theories of self, subjectivity, the space and time of the classroom and so on. Those working outside what may be termed mainstream education in alternative education contexts are also encouraged to participate.”

It is said that in the anthropocene humans are increasingly altering the geological evolution of the planet, an enormous task that would seem impossible for humans to perform by themselves, like physically moving a celestial body. However, it is not a faulty claim if we consider how, for instance, human waste has gradually altered climate cycle trapping heat energy in the atmosphere. This entrapped heat introduces disequilibrium to a closed system like the planet, thereby making it more susceptible to chaos. The geological effects of these patterns will have enormous impact on the way we view the fate of humanity in the decades to come.

If this effect eventually impacts on the heart of eating, of food availability, the nerve center of everyday existence, certainly the terms of eating will be drastically altered. The goal would be less of maintaining the collective integrity of the species in light of entropy or end times and will be more of sustaining the ‘who’ of the species. It becomes then the task of biopolitics which must cut up the subject in the way of choosing the fit, those fit to eat the last food available. In a situation like this, a revelation of last things becomes a critical barometer of freedom, or how freedom must not be put to waste, hence, the mantra of the urgency of conserving supplies, by cutting up freedom, by grafting it, to use Derrida’s words, to a desirable post-human end where the goal of a new philosophy of the subject is one of—“[Deciding] birth or death, including what is presupposed in the treatment of sperm or ovule, pregnant mothers, genetic genes, so-called bioethics or biopolitics … organ transplant, and tissue grafting.”[1]

In Derridean terms, this entails the problem of how to cut up the human subject. And yet, even technoscience, which assumes the new philosophy of the subject in the era of ‘last things’, is at a loss where precisely to cut up, perhaps, because there are too many flesh to cut up. Derrida says: “In spite of appearances, I am speaking here of very concrete and very current problems: the ethics and politics of the living. We know less than ever where to cut—either at birth or at death. And this also means that we never know, and never have known, how to cut up a subject.”[2]

Yet, it doesn’t discount the fact that the origin of humanity can be traced to the crime of cutting up, or cannibalism, if you will. The sub-ject , which formally introduced humanity into the scheme of things, began as a cut of meat, cut up from the abundance of nature, carved out from the physical void of the universe. Sub-jects cut themselves and others up, and in so doing consume energy. The entire process has been sub-jected to an economy, a colossal and now aggressively accelerating machine, a cutting industry, so that energy can be efficiently utilized until cutting goes all the way to the heart of things. It wants to cut the core, cutting to the chase. It wants to prove the wonders of cutting, that humanity, after all, is a cannibal to the last man.

What is unique in our contemporary age is that we have been used to living hybrid lives than were possible in the previous centuries, which also indicate on a much broader spectrum that large systems (presumably the source and perpetrators of alienation) are also able to penetrate our interior lives with perfect immediacy, that is to say, with less structural frictions and the contradictions they have to leap over before they could force themselves to break in. Surprisingly, this truth about systems require of us to take advantage of their hybridity. There has never been a perfect time to take advantage of this phenomenon precisely because hybridity is a weakness; it shows the vulnerability of the system even if it tries to gloss it over by speed (the acceleration of capital in today’s dispensation), and especially if it does that, assuming that the agency detects the silver lining. If there is anything more urgent to seize upon in forging a united front against the sources of alienation wherever we find them operating it is precisely this hybridity. Yet this also presupposes that any agency is a hybrid on the basic assumption that there is nothing outside the system.

That is where we can precisely locate the weakness of the system—if there is no outside to the system then the system must be utterly alone. It thrives on forcing the locks of our interior sanctuaries, mostly, the two immediate sanctuaries of the self, the family sphere and the ego sphere which qualify as substances in the sense that they require motion, externality and individuation. In contrast, the system lacks substance. It cannot live outside of itself (therefore has to pretend that it is moving relative to something outside itself) in contrast to agencies which can deceive themselves (better if it is done self-reflexively) that there is an ‘outside’ to look out for, to flee into, or an outside as providing a sense of stability whose taken-for-granted/ness constitutes its realism for them—reality as an independent dimension. (If self-deception is therefore done consciously then realism becomes the surplus of self-extension that one allows to move oneself in order to further individuate oneself in terms of creating more surpluses, more, presumably adaptable and controllable, real existences). Although Spinoza does not say something about existing in different modes simultaneously, which will correspond here to different adaptable existences, the fact that for him modes are fleeting or ‘nonessential’[1] encourages us to appropriate the modes in terms of their manageable appropriation by self-individuations.

Although Spinoza would not approve of our appropriation of his metaphysics, what can warrant a creative reconstruction of Spinoza’s teachings on substance is that if for him it is the essence of the substance to exist (in modes and attributes) then an external individuation (either fleeting or decidedly permanent) is required. In all these instances, substance requires motion. Still, we have not explained where the system comes from and what is going on in itself that makes it want to acquire substance by means of appropriating existence from agencies. Keep in mind that a system is also a hybrid, but a powerful one.

Systems have the best tendency to block the enhancement of the freedom of agency, or what in Spinoza would mean a sad power that tends to block the enhancement of power itself by dampening it and therefore dragging it towards its lowest potentiality. One can notice here that a system emerges from a certain encounter with power in terms of the encounter between and among passions which activate or dampen the intrinsic potency of power to enhance existence. (The reader may wonder where passions come from. Let us take passions as the first elements of the whole of nature as Spinoza described. Spinoza identified God with natura naturans which he described as “self-existing beings.”[2] In science, they may refer to energies, forces, etc., which have all perceptible characteristics of affectivity that we mentioned above. We are thus using the layman’s term passion to refer to the more technical language utilized in non-philosophical disciplines). A system emerges either as active or reactive. But since it is the nature of system to relate to freedom in the sense that it has to minimize its full autonomy, for a system to emerge it has to cut up something from freedom, then any system is inherently negative. And the moment it takes something it cut up from freedom as its own a system becomes a living and obviously large hybrid. What we are actually seeing here is the making of a real cyborg—any system is. (Hobbes called it the Leviathan). Counter-acting the social necessity of this cyborg—necessity in the sense that it has become a social contract—is the organic hybrid that is us who, as we mentioned above, have self-organizing capacities that can also translate into self-deceptive mechanisms, preferably reflexive.

This capacity for self-deception teeters between empowerment and dispossession, an oscillation that can prove fatal to lower life forms such as mosquitoes which cannot recognize the gap, the fissure, or the void that traverses the space between two attractors (sleep and awake), but a fluctuation that may prove life-enabling, without eliminating the precarity that attends to it, for human life forms. (In the case of mosquitoes, the oscillation between sleep and waking pattern can become permanent, involving a manipulation of the nervous system, which can leave an organism under this spell permanently awake until it dies).[3]

While lower monadic life forms (in the sense we will briefly discuss later) have the capacity for affects which help them survive, higher life forms have capabilities to rationalize the loop of time in the oscillation of subjective states, giving them better advantage for survival. While hybridity means dwelling between two (even more) subjective states the advantage of rationality in higher intelligent life forms (a product of evolutionary progress) keeps hybridity away from a state of permanent suspension or oscillation. Hybridity is an energy that can be used up; in other words, for higher intelligent life forms it can become an object of appropriation. The advantage of rationality, of course, owes a great deal to the affective potency of the neural networks of the brain—an organ that is by any standard a self-organizing system which also relates to other self-organizing systems, other organs and membrane networks found in the human body.

Unsurprisingly, the over-all affective networks generate a human body with no central executive organ. As Spinoza once remarked, “No one knows what a body can do.”[4] In process philosophy, this refers to the phenomenon of emergence—that life emerges after life after life with no governing principle. It just happens and it happens for the most part without us knowing the principles that govern the process itself. It takes care of itself. Take note that ‘principle’ can also refer to a creator, so process philosophy of this kind is also in principle resistant to the personification of creation theory. Going back to rationality, we can argue thus far that rationality is a result of an aleatory encounter—of bodies with other bodies, which in the course of the evolution of humanity has provided human civilization with an interior mechanism against the threat of large hybrid assemblages (the cyborgs we referred to earlier). For better or for worse, rationality, in all its essence a hybrid and a product of aleatory encounters, therefore its genealogy is sealed from appropriation of design, has given humanity leverage against total cyborg invasion. (Rationality, however, should not be treated as the nerve center of hybrid life. Rather, it is an efficient result of monadic affectation of different body networks forming into a powerful material assemblage. Rationality is therefore the result of the inherent drive of bodies to pursue connections that will give them better advantages for survival. If rationality no longer serves this end, bodies know what to do). Meanwhile, what we mean humanity here is what Kierkegaard had profoundly intuited: the actual subjectivity of human freedom.[5]

Here arises the comimmunology approach (or a common immunizing strategy in the face of entropy) proposed by Peter Sloterdijk.[6] In principle, hybrid agencies are much more vulnerable compared to systems, hence, the need for a ‘common immunizing’ strategy which becomes all the more pressing at a time when physical entropy implicates every living species in the planet. In contrast, hybrid approaches to change (those determined by a systematic appropriation of autonomy and potentiality of agencies for self-organization by large hybrid conglomerates) have greatly contributed to the confused modality of modern existence, leaving agent’s lives vulnerable to the different fluctuations of time. This kind of vulnerability is typical of monadic existence. Still, we cannot eliminate the fact that even as windowless (which also constitutes vulnerability) monads touch each other. And here is the importance of studying the analytic of hybridity. The sense of touch is crucial here for it generates a community of affects. Ants for instance are practically blind and yet they can build a self-sufficient colony solely by relying on the sense of touch, on affects and other relevant sensory mechanisms. In principle, ants are monads capable of immunizing themselves (collectively) against the threat of the outside world (that they cannot see!) relative to their capacity to sense danger, but also sources of negating entropy such as food which enhances their affective power to build and nourish a life-world.

Extended to human colonies, the affective lesson of ant colonies can help us realize and accept the fact that our knowledge of things is bounded, contingent, and that the only immediate knowledge we have is that of our own bodies which serve as a natural buffer against danger and entropy. Bodies are natural buffers against entropy which reveal its immediacy in affects which help rationality to express danger in an intelligible format. We can also say at this point that it is how rationality expresses its own immediacy to itself, practically with no body substance of its own. That is how it survives—by expressing its own rather inadequate affective power in terms of concepts, principles or intelligible signs which can reproduce in form the affectivity of bodies (which it lacks) in terms of the network of signifiers, signs, referents, etc. (in the sense that each word, for instance, is structurally related to other words, each word is co-constituting others, generally constituting a grammar, a syntax, etc.; in other words, language duplicates the affective networks of bodies in the actual world).

Extended to social structures, such as an academic institution, the affective power of monadic (affective) existence, what the sociologist Gabriel Tarde also describes as the tendency of monads to assemble,[7] can also refer to the self-organizing capacity of the human institution, that it has the capacity to survive even with limited resources, that a monadic existence is by the power of affects a nomad. Under present circumstances, a nomad is a hybrid agent.

What is rather the most crucial appropriation we can make here is that the threat to agencies (by cyborgs and large hybrid systems, such as corporations, state, etc.) has extended to the planetary, to a broader ecological scene. There is a certain thermodynamic principle or entropy involved here.

If entropy is a threat to ecology and ecology is impinging on the way we relate to the world, and if this also affects the way we envision the future, then a whole new but really familiar cyborg, what a Nobel Laureate describes as Gaia, is winning its war.[8] And if the central target of this entropic push of the geological, solar or cosmic economy that precedes the emergence of the human, is ‘the human’ itself, granting it is ‘central’ by the standard of creation, then rightly so ‘the human’ is losing the war, all the more when ‘the human’ continues to embrace a pre-entropic if not naïve resistance to the actual threat of chaos, disequilibrium, the sure fate of any closed system like the planet. The human that was charged of dominion of the planet in the old days was given custody of a different geological order. That order is no longer the same—it has become something entirely new which also indicates that a new approach has to be conceived, no longer of dominion, or conquest, or fundamentalism and naivety, but perhaps, of intelligent accommodation, rational acceptance or collective releasement to what is to come with the proviso that before it comes we have already immunized ourselves (as a human community that values and actualizes the terms of realizable justice) within the span of delayed entropy, what Saint Paul once described as the katechon, someone or something that will delay the second coming.[9] Energy wise, the second coming will be a spent energy of the universe coming down on us which will economize everything into a state of aneconomy where a new economy can be produced.

James Lovelock, an important climate scientist and a Nobel Prize awardee, introduced the term Gaia to refer to the self-healing process of Nature that can spell doom to our species. If Nature has a self-healing process, Lovelock argues that it can only proceed from Nature leaving its parts, the assemblages of life that it has created. In simple terms Nature will heal itself by abandoning us in terms of depletion of energy supply that sustains our species. The supply will deplete as Nature will use it up to give birth to a new geological era that may or may no longer include us. Part of the process will therefore depend on how we relate to this self-healing process. Unlike in previous aeons there are humans witnessing this event.

If any power is an assemblage of bodies or passions, and our desire is to forge a new assemblage, then power has to encourage participation by mutual mutation of bodies. With this, power can also help us actualize only one thing (by of course first willing only one thing) and that is the joyful passion of the monad that by nature always tends to assemble as a way of expressing its allergic nature to stasis.

And so, we need a gymnastic expression of joyful passions by first willing to exercise by of course first willing to assemble into a series of rehearsals. With repetition, rehearsals become a joyful necessity; it becomes music in the sense that the micro-fascism of drills and line formations becomes negligible. It is in rehearsals that bodies touch each other, monads in action, connecting, conjugating where the affects that get produced in the process make bodies forget about their smell, the complexion and texture of their skins, their bad breaths, etc. Monads only will one thing—to conjugate, to develop a line formation of both/and, not either/or which rather entails discrimination by demarcating boundaries. Monads are inherently democratic.

But necessity tends to terminate in boredom, and so, the key is to change the music which will affect a change of body rhythms, moods and temperament, a temporal and spatial change, a change in frequency, duration, the aesthetics of motion. The change in music is also expected to change perceptive capabilities—capabilities become differential, breaking the unilateral movement of perception in a linear way (from subject to object) in favor of whatever movement, whatever duration, whatever angle, perspective, etc., which disrupts perception. Since music can affect the body, it follows that it also affects its sense of self-coherence. Changing music is like changing the pull of gravity, or tilting the surface plane. If the ground tilts to 45 degrees, the body adapts to a different posture than it used to. With variations in grades the body becomes versatile.

Keep in mind that we are referring only to musicality. So far everything here is a rehearsal. Nature can tilt the ground someday to which bodies can respond differently in the same manner as climate change is now changing body response to diseases. Our musical rehearsal is actually a rehearsal ‘in form’ of the kind of habituation that we will have to get used to when entropy becomes stronger and stronger in time. This is crucial. The waiting for Godot is over.

With Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason which actually forms the best case for Monadology, the days of miracle are over.[1] In a nutshell, what is the principle of sufficient reason? Owing to the nature of monads to look for the best possible connection that will enhance its existence, it suffices to say that even the laws of nature are contingent. They change as monads change. If today we have a gravity that makes us stand upright, someday we may have one that will compel us to stand in oblique formation. It only takes a super earthquake to tilt the earth’s balance. Lest we forget, human beings are not the only monads. Nature is full of nonhuman monads which can in fact tilt that balance as material, physical, and chemical elements of Nature are now forming a hostile assemblage to human habitation.

But we cannot permanently settle with musicality. We cannot dance forever. And there is the floor. In this light we need a technicity in the sense Gilbert Simondon describes it—“a practical inventive engagement.”[2] (Simondon is another figure besides Tarde who influenced Deleuze who, as a way of acknowledging, is the main theoretical influence behind our conjugational, that is to say, ‘both/and’ approach to other disciplines vis-à-vis philosophy).

If Simondon was actually describing our relations to nonhuman entities like machines or technical objects,[3] our approach would be like understanding the analytic of the floor or the ground which as with Simondon’s notion of technicity which encourages technical participation between and among objects (a hammer is not a hammer unless it is always already related to something it can be used for, say, to nail a nail, which is not what a hammer is for absolutely, hence, a hammer is also related to something beyond its known practical use which makes a hammer available even for non-utilitarian purposes, like in art installations, etc.) encourages participation between the dance and the floor or the ground. In ‘dance floor’ two words (monads) conjugate to form a meaning (an assemblage that accommodates action not only on the part of the dance, which we are taking here in its active sense, but also on the part of the floor—the floor’s molecular assemblage is affected by the movement on the surface). The key to understanding this analytic is in its non-reductionist relation. In the case of the word ‘dance floor’ the conjugation is not reducible to a pre-arranged conjugation like economy, for instance. What actually brings the ‘dance floor’ to an expression (linguistic) is an active conjugation of bodies which do not anticipate the word ‘dance floor’. Bodies encounter the floor. In turn, the floor encounters bodies. What is produced in the process is not subject to the exchange-value (between body and the floor or ground) of any pre-arranged conjugation. The encounter between these two bodies is in principle aleatory.

What are we driving at here? We mentioned about rehearsals. One of the reasons we need to change the music in rehearsals is that we can be stuck in its necessity, stuck in the sense that we may ignore the true purpose of the rehearsal (hence, the lack of inventive engagement) and that is to encourage the ground to open which would technically ‘ground’ the activity to a halt, or silence any kind of music. We can say here that the music changes because the ground remains firm. While it is true that the rehearsal makes the body versatile, as long as the ground is sturdy and dense, versality can turn into vice. This is what happens to post-modernism. The acceleration of capital compels the individual to become proficient, to learn how to dance, and dance to different tunes. As long as acceleration does not hit a highpoint versality has no other purpose than individuation and thermo-release which creates the false necessity of autonomy, of more forced hybrid expressions. For Simondon, this is an example of succumbing to adaptationism.[4] In other words, the ground must gape open to interrupt necessity.

We do not mean to invite entropy to do the work of opening the ground. We can imagine a catastrophe. Today, earthquakes are becoming stronger. Rather, we mean to invite ourselves to break our own grounds, to question even the necessity of the musical, the rehearsals as they too can turn into vices.

This is where research comes in—one looks into holes (our vulnerability to adaptationism) to see what’s happening. Is there no better way to express this kind of investigation than as another step towards immunizing ourselves against adaptation, against necessity, against the reticularity of the system, against complacency, naivety which can nurture fanaticism, especially now that necessity comes in the guise of entropy? What is ironic about entropy is that while it encourages the release of heat energy from bodies that translate to activity and the passion for individuation (such as the dancing we mentioned and the liberty of changing the music) it is also indifferent to the ground like Deleuze’s joyful typhoon.[5] As monads that express the best of their existence, typhoons are simply expressing their potencies when they pour down on human lives which, meanwhile, are stuck with necessity.

What comes up after a long hiatus since after my last post is this musing on ‘end times’…

Here, I would like to speak about the epistemic gap between science and the commons, partly influenced by Bruno Latour’s science studies theory. This epistemic gap between science and the commons may thus be interpreted as a resultant phenomenon of two conflicting views on the ‘nature’ of Nature. That nature is naturalized according to how science and the commons interpret Nature attests to what Bruno Latour (Politics of Nature) describes as the politics immanent to our view of the outside. For purposes of making sense of the outside, thereof respond to its entropic limits and potentials both science and the commons desire to absorb the outside, technically an energy assemblage, into their respective symbolic universes. Each has a symbolic universe different from the other—each has a different concept of nature. This in turn feeds on the difficulty of forging a global concept of Nature in the era of climate entropy.

One of the many serious attempts to respond to Nature’s entropic limits and potentials is the concern over food safety which we may designate here as a post-ecological concern. As a post-ecological concern, concern over food safety passes beyond the limit of ecological thinking that simply illustrates how nature is constantly revealing signs of increasing entropy into the post-ecological as a phase in ecological entropy in which any ecological concern is redirected to the quest for the good life. Food safety becomes a crucial concern in a post-ecological phase. Whereas in the ecological phase the concern is that of preparing human populations to face entropic challenges, in the post-ecological the concern is with a certain intended malice—the protection of selected populations deemed more capable to survive a total ecological onslaught (something that can also explain the aggressive spatial planning of urban and rural spaces isolating huge populations while wreaking havoc on the environment). Global social conflicts, which are mainly premised on the clamor for food security, are undoubtedly a collective critical response to this post-ecological trend. Incidentally, this post-ecological phase also coincides with the post-humanization of humanity where technology is drawing closer to developing a human crisis susceptible to a full-blown technological intervention in terms of what Ray Kurzweil describes as the event of singularity, the disembodiment of the human (which takes mass poverty as collateral) necessary to survive a post-ecological holocaust.

When we speak of food safety we speak of the right molecular assemblage essential in forming a healthy body, which explains the importance of science in the post-ecological phase. Nonetheless, as the role of science is reduced to disciplinal normativity in the ecological phase, mobilizing disparate disciplines of science to embrace a concept of global Nature, in the post-ecological phase this disciplinal normativity fails to penetrate the symbolic universe of the commons. Seemingly, the commons are stuck up in their own politics of nature in inverse proportion to the disciplinal preoccupation of science in the ecological phase. On the advent of the post-ecological, science is left extremely powerless as it is not its role to save populations which rests instead on government mandate. Unfortunately, governments are epistemically extrinsic to the role of closing the communicative gap between science and the commons essential to transform symbolic communicative spaces into a unified political mobility in response to the challenges of climate entropy. To save populations in the post-ecological phase, governments must carry out an epistemic role that can reach out to symbolic universes to unite them under a global concept of Nature. But this necessarily translates into a post-natural politics of governance, something it can only learn from science that has by then learned to transcend its pure epistemic role, which implies that it has somehow closed the gap that used to divide its discipline from the universe of the commons. Taking cue from Isabelle Stengers, who is a collaborator of Bruno Latour, we may describe this ideal event of inter-collapsing agencies as cosmopolitics. Latour for his part sticks to the term political ecology. From here, we can aim to mobilize the terms of a new political ecology in addressing the critical shift into food safety, emphasizing here that the ecological phase of concern over food security vis-à-vis the bloating of human population should remain the chief focus of global governance.

The critical shift could be reversed, assuming there is already a growing emphasis on food safety which endorses the view that not all can be saved from an ecological holocaust. The refocusing on food security addresses the premise that the shift to food safety is intrinsically selective and historically insensitive. On the one hand, selectivity is an inevitable approach in food safety as food is basically a commodity that is not independent of how market pricing works. On the other hand, the insensitivity of emphasis on food safety can be seen in how the rise of human populations is in effect condoned by the commercial food industry. The thermo-politics that works behind food production is a simple procedure: food sustains the thermal potential of the species necessary to reproduce. When this thermal heat is producing an unwanted spike in heat entrapped in the atmosphere which in turn generates human diseases, among others, the response of governments in the early post-ecological phase is to ensure food safety. While heat entropy is entrapped and is showing no signs of cooling down, food safety can only save those who can afford means to survive the ‘end times’.

In the above light, we may propose a post-natural politics of food security as a response to the post-ecological trend which essentially depends on how the epistemic gap between science and the commons can be narrowed. This entails that global governance invests in a post-ecological refocusing of democracy as a process of narrowing epistemic distances, not a democracy that still clings to pre-ecological and naïve ecological terms predominantly influenced by capital.

In my next post I wish to relate this postecological trend to post-apocalypticism, accelerationism and several other ruminations on a variety of manic ‘entrophilia’ (apologies for the neologism) which have increasingly gained traction in today’s academic discourse. Hopefully, I will not default on my promise.

Deleuze in his late works, especially after his last collaboration with Guattari, was grappling with something that all those collaborations could only hint at. But we can also say, apropos his early works which I think were more substantially ecological that Deleuze had already fixed his conceptual gaze on two of his most important influences, namely, Spinoza and Nietzsche. Spinoza and Nietzsche to my mind constitute the most crucial threads of Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze’s masterful handling of concepts of body, affect, desires, and even the notion of refrain (that he expanded with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus) is a creative elucidation of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies.

What Deleuze added to this dyadic conceptual machine (SpinozaNietzsche)—I am utilizing the mathematical dyadic operator without dots or cross between the two names such as AB—is I think the elaboration of the question of the unconscious that is correlated to the death of God, which may be rephrased here as the elaboration of the question of the strange nature of life and the persistence of life without the need for an ‘exemplary causality.’ Both Spinoza and Nietzsche also grappled with this problem. Spinoza expanded the problem of the unconscious in terms of the tireless determinism of the ultimate substance whose modes and attributes could be demonstrated, using contemporary psychoanalytic lenses, as cathexes, affects, ripples of an unknown source of force. There is no question for Spinoza that this source is Life which he preferred to assume the immanent essence of God (God is Spinoza’s line of [accomplished] becoming: God as the name that designates the accomplishment of his work as a desiring machine). For Nietzsche, it is more explicitly immanent. The source is the will which could be interpreted more immanently still in Deleuzian terms as a body without organs (BwO). The latter is correlated to the unconscious in the sense that, like the unconscious, BwO is a plane of consistency that receives intensities and flows, compositional multiplication of energy that grows as conjunctions are made. In psychoanalytic terms, this plane may also qualify into the notion of the Real, empty but is always invoked by composition (which makes it virtual in essence) in terms of grasping, reaching, and proceeding without a goal. Nietzsche’s concept of will fits into this format of the unconscious as BwO precisely in the sense of the will as ‘uneasiness’, ‘living in a state almost close to zero,’ as Deleuze describes.

And this kind of discomfort grows virtually in the sense that only the functions of its uneasiness can be detected in terms of the expressions it realizes and not some independent cause of discomfort. Its expressions can also transform the plane, the will as unconscious, into a new compositional plane (to will more) that serves as an attractor to another serialization of becoming. The aimlessness of this serialization no doubt makes the will as BwO vulnerable to be reterritorialized by a stratic machine, such as, in the case of Nietzsche, the reactive force of nihilism by conjugating desire to a goal, a finality. The finality germane to this kind of nihilism is such that it wills only itself, itself being its own object of willing, the object being a non-object precisely as willing does not presuppose anything but itself as its object, hence, its own subjectivity foreclosed to contamination by difference and othering.

In both treatments of the unconscious, life can serve as a cushion that absorbs the conceptual shocks of the philosophers’ immanent failure to draw a map that could show not only how to enter a force field within which to compose a new line of becoming but also how to get out. Still, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze prefers the way-map over the psychoanalytic practice of tracing (that is never keen on trying a way out). The way-map illustrates how to deal with the unconscious, how to deal with life, or to put it within the context of the problem of vitalism, how to deal with a force field that allows you to get in but, unfortunately, does not guarantee a way out. Certainly, that is a problem that had provoked the existentialist forays of the past decades. Life is the spider that lures an unwitting victim to die freely; freely in the sense that the way out is the necessity to live out the entropic process whose principle the unsuspecting insect attests as certain and final in proportion to how it resists death.

Life as a cushion certainly applies to the insect’s problem of getting out which by the way affords it a critical experience of a limit. It is at that point where the insect, assuming its consciousness is capable of doing a Sartrean lament, acquires a capacity to approach life seemingly at its closest, in death. On the other side is life cushioning the ripples of the resistance to death by responding in a way that allows the insect to experience in discreet and analytic way, which heightens a neural response to a threshold limit essential to a radical existential awakening, the indifference of life itself. It cushions the resistance and responds coldly, triggering a serialization of futile resistance (what we can describe with Laruelle’s notion of the unilateral movement of the One unconcerned about our representations of it). Understandably, the problem of vitalism (which we have freely transposed here to a problem of how to deal with life) has, in Colebrook’s observations, ‘mobilized philosophical, theoretical and literary contretemps,’ but I should add, has also in general encouraged an understanding of Life that can benevolently accommodate the ripples of our resistance to death. We praise life for its seemingly perfect response mechanism that has ironically transformed the texture of the problem, from indifference to an opportunity to resist freely which endorses a view of the subject, to utilize Deleuze’s lingo, as a freely deterritorializing will. We must recall here that Deleuze (with Guattari) devoted the last sections of A Thousand Plateaus to an elaboration of the difference between absolute positive deterritorialization and absolute negative deterritorialization, a classic case of rehearsing a Nietzschean elucidation of the difference between active and reactive forces. If it will take time for Life to release the tension accruing upon its absorbent capacity, talking about a large closed system, such as society, or continent, or planet which have more or less measurable span relative to its entropic potential, the allure of freedom is difficult to resist, especially for the West that enjoys huge resources at its disposal to get by. Entropic management of resources is therefore the key to understanding life as a benevolent shock absorber.

Taken from a larger ecological context, the arguments and disputes about freedom are also triggered in the West by its unique political geography. What makes this political geography unique is the way the West has successfully built a protective mechanism against any releasement of tension that Life can make at any point in the entropic process. This is what the Western Enlightenment project was all about (the Orient had a remarkably different event) which was actually preceded by an already intensive prehension of a notion of Life as benevolent, quietly shaping the mood of the Western mind. This prehension, call it a Hegelian spirit, was efficiently coded by an already established political mechanism, a coding of territories and bodies, of spaces and desiring machines. Yet, the prehensive template was not ‘manna from heaven’. It was historically shaped by the preceding epoch which the present channels to a new level of stratification, without saying here that it ceases to be a spirit because its transmission was historically mediated. It remains a spirit by all means in proportion to how it would constantly instigate argument after argument—the question of the strange nature of life, as you put it, deploying Nietzsche’s shocker through Colebrook’s probing statements:

“That is, following Nietzsche we might ask what the strange nature of life is such that it posits a world other than life, a world that accuses life? At the same time, and again following Nietzsche, if such a thought of a world other than the lived is possible, what does this tell us about the living? In this second sense, vitalism returns already formed models and normative images back to their generating source, but at the same time confronts a potential for self-annihilation within generating life ‘itself’.”

The Orient had long ago responded to the question of the strange nature of life by positing what Nietzsche had sought to introduce into the Western intellectual landscape, the concept of the recurrence of the Same. Nietzsche knew the odds involved—he had to ignore how life is differently managed in the Orient and the West by postulating a notion of the Same to refer to life as a global concept. As a global concept Life foreshadows differences in culture and most especially geographical assemblages in the sense that foreshadowing is employed from the standpoint of a being capable of self-differentiation, obviously a concept foreign to the Orient precisely because it is taken for granted. For the Orient, Life not Being self-differentiates, that is to say, in a strange manner. In contrast, the self-differentiation of Being in the West is carried out in a reflexive manner. The correlations are far from neat nonetheless.

On the one hand, the strange nature of Life leaves the problematic of Being unsettled, or the problematic of responsal which necessarily situates Being into a bind. The ultimate response of the metaphysical Orient (metaphysical in the sense that Life dominates its philosophy) is to relegate Being to the transitoriness of change, to a surface plane of determination which legitimates an enfoldment dividing a horizon—between above and below. In this sense, Life becomes a territorializing machine which subordinates Being-below (or Being) to an exemplary causality, a principle that causes the fold. On the other hand, the reflexive essence of Being, the negative legacy of the Orient in the sense that Being is introduced as a problematic of determination that it (the Orient) consigned to becoming, claims an exemplary causality that efficiently operationalizes the fold from a declaration of suffering that must be overcome. What the Orient abandoned to the entropic process, Being (which indicates that Life is a dominant principle), the West salvaged in order to arrest the infinite determinism of life.

Nonetheless, the Oriental praise of Life is different from the early Western celebration of life as benevolent (which we mentioned above) seemingly so ordered as to afford Being an in-between space of individual determination out of deferred entropic time. Indeed, the very taking up of Being as an issue necessarily defers time in the sense that it introduces an obstructive flow by individualizing life, singularizing the phases of its flow, literally forcing it to express itself; by retarding life in terms of generating its double from the outside, hence, minimizing its intensity by absorbing its energy that enhances singular bodies’ performance while Life stands still this time because seemingly deprived of pure voidality, its unilateral non-affair with Being.

But when Heidegger affirms that Being, or the name that designates the logic of the ontological difference, we are fortunate to discover that the transitory character of the difference in question quietly pays homage to Life, to the Oriental praise of its mystery for which Heidegger describes the task of thinking to remain open to its releasement, to remain open to the releasement of the Orient. Unfortunately, the Orient has no excess (nihilism) to release in which case Heidegger had to simply imagine the arrival of the Orient. But first, the Orient must be deprived of its Life principle in order to arrive at Being. Such is the logic of the conquest of the Other of the West.

But we are thinking of a new way of depriving Life of its exemplary principle.

Deleuze, through Nietzsche, would have the guts to declare the obvious. The transition of Being gives life its due. But what kind of life is that to which Being gives its due? For Deleuze, this life no longer poses the questions that used to surround its immanence, such as, how it was able to make possible a ‘world other than the lived,’ certainly a question that is permissible only in Being. This time Life is no longer benevolent, rather indifferent. It seems Being has successfully transitioned into Life, into a state of non-Being, courtesy of the post-humanist techno-nihilism of contemporary time, in which the world is more than a fable (more than what Nietzsche foretold) because it is this time devoid of human interest. In a slight departure from Deleuze’s concept of Life, we are arguing here that Being is rather overcome by the imperial hegemony of Life, life transformed into an overarching principle.

No doubt technocapitalism has pushed Being to the limits of the ontological difference by dissolving difference in favor of the non-temporal unilateralization of a global space called Life. Being has dissolved into the indifferent intentionality of biopower.

….

I hope to make it clear that this response to your question does not by any means harbour a defeatist attitude towards Being and its promise of transition if not its immanent potential to evolve without an end. Far from surrendering Being even to the realization that climate entropy is real, that Being is at risk of transitioning into an irreversible end of difference, my position remains materialist in the sense of a historical analytic: Life is not ahistorical and absolute. I should add: the problem of entropy has always been, since the dawn of humanity, a question of the management of difference.

From the savage to the paranoid despotic regime and to the modern post-signifying (nihilistic) regime of passion and subjectivity, the strange nature of life is to Being the familiar question of how to manage its transition, how to negotiate with change, how to make of the indefinite void that releases itself as a problematic at exactly the point when a transition is decided, when Being is decided as a proceeding, as a ritual, as a singularization to be incarnated (in the family, in society, etc.), to be lived, to be instantiated in time which enacts a break in the unilateral indifference of entropy (or space). When Man decided to have a break it was to negotiate with space, with the void by puncturing a hole on the plane of immanence, the hole as the decidability of Being itself. Space gradually ceased to be a concern of Being until Being is decided (in technocapitalism) as a pure chase, as time without a transition, the pure form of the future (that of pure space, the post-human), without looking back which is what time can offer, what Being as time can really offer.

The question for today is not whether to accelerate or decelerate (a question that serves the interest of space, of life as biopower, of admitting that nihilism is irreversible), but rather to reform our understanding of time which is of a transitory essence, which has the character of Being as a passage. To reclaim the capacity of Man as people to decide His fate according to His capacity for micro-fascistic management of entropy—to fight fire with fire. To defy Life acting as an extraneous force. Not to reclaim an Identity but to reclaim the question of what they are, what they are capable of doing. Man-people is capable of time. Not of space, not of life, but of production. Not of output, but rather of an event that lacks in nothing. The question is how to reclaim Man-people from His needless pilgrimage into space. To reclaim His virtuality, His species-being.

Already a confused mix of universal and particular, species-being (a virtual consistent existent) is a wound incarnated in Man, a wound that also teaches him that it can heal, but only in time which means it can also not heal unless the incarnation commits itself to the numbness of space. (Biopower is all about a speedy recovery, depriving the body of the phases of singularities of experience). Deleuze remarks: ‘A wound existed before me; not a transcendence of a wound as higher actuality.’ A different outcome takes place when it is understood otherwise as an exemplary causality such that the wound can be healed by embarking into space, to numbness, by the aid of anesthesia.

But life is no healer.

(End)

Related articles:

You can see Steven’s question in the comment box on this blog. (See also Claire Colebrook’s Deleuze and the Meaning of Life)

Between Planes (fractalontology.wordpress.com)

The Age of Speed: Accelerationism, Politics, and the Future Present (darkecologies.com)

A post dedicated to a friend, a fellow pilgrim, a writing machine, a former student still entrapped in the semiotic stratic machine of Heideggerian scholarship…

In his reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger stated at one point that the present time has transformed into a Nietzschean situation in which the will rigidifies everything into a lack of will. We understand this situation to be an effect of nihilism, the will to not will anymore.

In this light, Dasein is caught up in a situation where it confronts profound boredom, due to lack of real motivation to continue willing. Dasein confronts a time that stands still. It is however in this precise situation where Dasein can exercise its transitory character, to perform a going-between while time stands still. In Heidegger this vacant order of time is metaphysically occasioned by Nothing that nothings. If technology for Heidegger has become the new form of metaphysics, then the metaphysical occasioning of nihilism is here concretely expressed in terms of the power of technology to strip human projects off of their ‘humanly’ motivations. But this is only one side of technology. Heidegger also insists that the question concerning technology is best understood outside of the question of technology itself, that is to say, non-technologically. It is here where the question of technology is referred to the metaphysics of willing that occupied Nietzsche’s late speculations on the fate of Western society.

Before going any further, let me clarify what I mean by Dasein’s transitory character. But, perhaps, it is better to start here with the ontological difference that elsewhere Heidegger describes as having the character of a passage. Consistent with his project of fundamental ontology, the destructive retrieval of being, Heidegger argues that the difference between Being and being/s is not permanent. This is where Heidegger is at his best historical. The difference is historically arbitrary, invested with humanistic projects (human-centered). Certainly, the ontological difference is addressed to the historical character of Dasein, the human dasein that is conscious of the difference that history employs. In fact, the ontological difference is an issue only for Dasein. And because the ontological difference has Being as its central issue Being is an issue for Dasein, that is, as a being-in-the-world. The world is where the ontological difference is intensively employed by history that is itself invested with human projects.

This history has reached a point where human investments which undergird its continuity have exhausted their limits in the sense that they have been stripped of fundamental human motivations. It is certainly the case of human progress that turns against the human that inspired it all (the case of Enlightenment). The human inspiration is now sacrificed in favor of the radicalization of the human into the post-human, hence, the divestment. This is not only relevant to philosophy of technology; a number of applications of this post-human project can be detected in postmodernism which extends this logic into a defence of the multiplicity of meanings enough to establish the premise that no human is up to the task of controlling the process, distribution and production of signs (meanings). The human is in fact only an emergent entity produced by the interplay of signs above the plane of individual determination. As an emergent entity, the human is an accidental occurrence of the play of signs which follow an independent logic. The human becomes the handmaiden of semiotics.

A sensible reader of Heidegger can detect here the workings of the ontological difference. ‘Being’ is transposed into ‘Sign’, ‘being’ into the human Dasein. When Heidegger elsewhere states that Language is the house of Being, he is certainly referring to the paradox of language as a milieu of signs, of meanings which, in postmodernist lingo, is made possible by the interplay of beings in their multiplicity. Thus, language is the site of this interplay and as a site does not express anything (it only accommodates different expressions). Being is not expressed by the multiplicity of signs or meanings. Being escapes expression.

But as seemingly empty Being persists in language that does not express anything but simply locates the intentionalities of the production of signs. These intentionalities are also what we described earlier as human investments. Language therefore localizes expressions making them reducible to intentionalities. By a destructive retrieval of Being Heidegger reduces these intentionalities to a particular occasioning of Being which also exposes how Being becomes rarely understood as to its essence as fundamentally withdrawing from any human attempt to universalize it such as in terms of establishing the ontological difference between Being and being/s. But as a house of Being language can help us locate these intentionalities and expose their contingent character such as one can detect the intentionality of the builder of the house by looking into the structures of the house itself. These intentionalities often neglect the subterranean depths that escape masterly profiling by an intending gaze.

The question of intentionality is therefore the question, àpropos the house, of what it conceals by unconcealing, deliberate or not on the part of the builder, the intensive quality of work that raised the house from the ground up. Neither the builder nor in fact the house does the unconcealment. Life betrays the human and non-human by exposing their transitory character through a miscarriage, a breakage, through the thermal, chemical and molecular cracks that time pulls off from under its sleeve. Time unconceals by patiently accommodating the inner works of entropy. But time also conceals in the sense that it takes time (it demands itself) to reveal the dynamics of contingency and mortality. It demands the risk of getting it all wrong. It demands trial and error; it demands, this time in the language of Deleuze, physical and mental legwork. Certainly, we are no longer operating within the Husserlian concept of intention. It acquires a powerful historical form in Heidegger that Husserl lacked in the sense of historically reporting the obvious, the obvious being the negative appearance of what is concealed which is continually withdrawing from representation regardless whether one deliberately conceals or unconceals…

Heidegger strengthens Nietzsche’s appeal to humanity in the aftermath of the collapse of representational truth where only appearances truly matter–either to negate or affirm this world. To negate this world requires a will to will its dissolution. To affirm it may take two forms: 1) to embrace its negativity but short of radicalizing the gesture into opening oneself onto new plateaus of becoming, in which case the self withdraws into a brooding existential mode ala Kierkegaard, and 2) to say no to this world as a manifestation of a will to invent a new one, to say yes to the world’s decomposition, to politically will its conscious decline.

But instead of treating it as a site language is treated in postmodernism as the very being of Being itself which means the very inescapability of language (a sign of embracing negativity). From site to spirit. From history to an oblivious sort of metaphysics, or simply metaphysics as forgetfulness of the historical character of occasioning Being such as occasioning it in language as a site, as a house. Here, the transitory character of the ontological difference becomes understood as the transitoriness of human history that will culminate in the dissolution of human history in the form of posthumanity. This is also extended to Dasein’s transitory character—Dasein will eventually give way to a being-in-the-world in a radically accomplished form. (Heidegger preferred ‘a new autochthonous form’, an expression that resists the linear progression of the transition in question). The postmodern inescapability of language, or language autonomous from human intentionalities, becomes the very expression of the posthuman. The trick is to ignore language as a site, as architecture. Language then becomes planetary or continental. In this sense language also loses its creativity, becomes stripped of its localizability.

Language ceases to be a function of coding or decoding, as well as tracing the overlaps between the two such that, as Nietzsche and Kafka exhibited in their works, all codes are mixed up in the sense of inventing new ones. And because language is a site, all the more the overlaps become a function of inventing new sites, new lines of mobilization, a new geography, new islands, a new consciousness…

Indeed, when language becomes planetary and continental, nihilism sets in when the motivation to invent collapses. It is undeniable that technology in its present form has radicalized the post-humanization of language and creativity. Technology has reached a planetary scale in proportion to the loss of human motivation, of local expressions and, need we say, its architecture. In the same manner, globalization is increasingly flattening the world into a universal space of expression. Certainly, it is only possible when language has lost is local expressibility. (We can therefore understand Heidegger’s suspicion of science that has developed a universal code of expression in mathematics; or why Leibniz’s dream of universal language failed, or why the tower of Babel got struck by lightning).

Technology has become the mega-house of Being. To reclaim the local essence of language is precisely to will a technology that can reclaim language as a site, as an expression, and thereof break free from the global semionihilism of our modern time; to put it in terms of the grammar of the multitude that have been challenging states and governments today (in Turkey, Brazil, and other parts of the world, more are waiting to explode), to challenge the preoccupation of today’s nihilism with all forms of posthumanity. Global protests have initiated a pattern to break the profound boredom that Heidegger detected on the tail of nihilism, on one side, an attitude that inclines towards apathy, on the other, that which leans towards a ‘demented or suicidal collapse’ (expressing it here in the language of Deleuze and Guattari). To challenge technology is to compel its codes to invent new lines of flight away and in defiance of technocapitalism. To challenge technology is to seize its speed, its intrinsic mechanism to deflect contemplation which demands a slow, discreet reflexive process, a process of time reckoning, certainly an antidote to apathy borne of a systematically induced failure to catch up with acceleration.

But also, to challenge technology is to redirect its speed to a people’s entropic trajectory. Let a new people manage what is left or what gets turned into a stockpile, a standing reserve, of human collective posterity—the biopolitical and geoinformational constituent assemblages of desiring species which is certainly no exemption from the motion of entropy and decay. A new people’s micro-fascistic management of death in the sense of intelligent Dionysian utilization of body intensities, of forces of conjunctions of flows of desires which Marx unabashedly described as the dictatorship of a people, the peasants and proletariats of his time. This promising dictatorship was long ago reterritorialized by the new capitalist system of conjugating body-intensities into machinic conglomerates of bored ambulatory zombies, undead people under the neo-liberal regime of global capitalism, paralyzed as disenabled of carrying out a going-between, of creating a space, a line of flight between boredom and fatigue. The new people will be the proletariats and peasants of our times who have also learned to renounce the reterritorializing scheme of vanguard politics—the prolets and peasants of the new conjugation of classes of desires, the non-standard prolets and -peasants of a new autochthonous class of resistance, loosely termed the precariats. (Or: what Berardi, under the influence of Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari, would describe as the cognitariats of the post-Fordist age. Arguably, this non-standard class politics of a new class comes as a good toxicant measure of Dionysian booze, an inebriation of the sort that can divine the boundary between intelligent, smart, sensible compositional anarchy and plunging into chaos).

Technology is nothing technological as it is not only a matter of functions, extending the temporal and spatial capabilities of bodies and desiring machines, but also because it breeds poverty, alienation and estrangement. Notwithstanding their pure unmediated recognisability as local sites of experience (poverty, alienation and estrangement), they are nonetheless stripped of their capacities for expression (to code an experience away from its political indetermination, from the semiotic limbo—by political we mean the capability to act against homogeneity and finality) in proportion to how they are being made distinctly capable of indifference, reduced to minding bare necessity. Still everything partakes of the transitory, like the ontological difference.

Now, more and more are challenging the claim that Being is transiting into a stage where language will have to necessarily demolish houses, parks, buildings, and schools, convert strawberry fields, farmlands into commercial zones, business districts, enclosures of capital, etc. The ontological difference has the character of a passage precisely because ontology is not All. Life, the Deleuzian pure immanence, is the better judge. Being is not All because there is love, there is beauty. There are bodies without organs…

There is the silence of the lambs, the depression of dogs, the patience of termites, and the slow aging process of cells. There is nothing. There are the dark nights of the universe.

There is il y a, there is the ultimate ravisher of an ethics of transcendence that can never transcend itself for its too humanistic protestations against Heidegger. There is the Same as pre-ontic, pre-subjective Real, the entropic pre-existence of Nature as an accidental assemblage, an ecology that supplants the ethicality of the face. There is post-ethicality that reinstitutes the human into the flux of becoming where the novelty of the face-to-face encounter collapses into the Spinozan determinism of the Same that no human can reverse, because it is Justice (justice of the Same), even by becoming good for goodness sake. But only a micro-fascism of a people, neither a face nor an ethical subject, can discover the true causes of alienation, of misery and the absurd. What affords a people their contingent share of cosmic joy is their intelligent discovery of the causes behind sadness, behind the inevitability of the absurd. A Spinozist non-standard ethics of joy which Machiavelli transformed into a working ethics, an ethic of a people.

When Levinas was given by life an opportunity to speak on behalf of a missing people, he chose to sideline their body-intensities, the flow conjunctions of their nomadic desires by instead channeling jouissance to individual de-subjectivation in pursuit of justice that can only take place outside the subject, obviously an opportunity he squandered in terms of his excessive catatonic interest in the face of a European Jew. Thus, the proper counter-point to Levinas is the non-faces of Palestinian Jews, non-standard Jews (we are borrowing the sense of non-standard from Laruelle); also, the counter-point of a new geography, without walls erected by the militarist Zionist state, which will be peopled by the Palestinian Jews, by the future Christs, the futuristic war machines of a bastard race that, in Deleuze’s language, ‘ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations.’

Here, we also need to change the myth. God did not create subjects with faces, like Adam and Eve; rather He concocted a faceless people. Faces could be made and fabricated, after much legwork traversing islands and open plateaus, hills, steppes, mountains and valleys, a by-product of molecular and phylogenetic translations of migrant ambulatory bodies (the envy of zombies) mutually conjugating flows of desires to a plane of consistency where desires settled (in Freud, the release of tensions) in honour of the incredible work of peace.

There is one Cause and that is the impossible inevitability of Life. Life is inevitable because we can do nothing about It except to learn to negotiate with Nature’s entropic resources which is the absolute precondition of all ethics.

There are Levinasians and Ricoeurians, even still, hard knuckled Heideggerians, or what have you, those types you can tolerate for their ingenuous if not petty machinic parroting of wholesome words that never dance, never make love, simply because they are friends of your friends. There is Derrida who quips—friendship effracts a boring circle, this circle of the given-time of the accelerating motion of Capital.

There’s an orgy and a juju. There is a funeral parlor. There is withdrawal.

There is precinct number 9. Skipping a number is not Zeno’s greatest strength. But there are plateaus of becoming Kierkegaard would find very hard to fathom, becomings that would render a leap of faith pathetic and boring.

There, the connection between ‘spontaneous self-organization and absolute deterritorialization cannot be missed. Hence, my short observation on Zizek’s salient criticism of Deleuze and Guattari.

I think this is one of the rare moments of Zizek where he truly sounds Marxist though he would wish his expressions be understood in a strictly Hegelo-Lacanian dialectics. In other words, just another misfire yet I would credit him for his criticism of spontaneous self-organization that takes the state as anathema to human freedom and autonomy. But contrary to his claim, Deleuze and Guattari, the salient targets of his critique, also allow for a certain openness to be reterritorialized by the state if only to check the tendency of abstract machines to “rival the Body without organs” at the risk of plunging into black holes, empty spaces into which voidal machines are falling in a manner that is totally blind to the lure of entropy. Deleuze and Guattari are faithful to the Marxist orientation in this sense–both submit to the necessity to reinvent the state, to protect the strata as a plane of composition in the same manner a fisherman would protect the shore. When Deleuze and Guattari argue in favor of spontaneous self-organization, we must not miss the context of their support for absolute deterritorialization, that is to say, the context within which an absolute positive form of human autonomy can be practiced. Before we identify this context let us factor in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of absolutely but positive deterritorialized abstract machines (or a people capable of spontaneous self-organization): “There is no subject of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 292).

Apropos the passage quoted above we might as well ask: what are the conditions for abstract machines to exercise positive deterritorialization vis-à-vis the problematic of engaging the majority as well as the minority (which could well be a weak variant of a majority)? The answer may be simple–there is a stratum as a generic plane of composition that allows for any kind of deterritorialization. But the strata are not independent of historical and social productions inasmuch as no deterritorialization is possible without an already or pre-existing state of production which can dominate the mode of production of a given strata. This is the case of how real capitalism emerged from a state of inadequation between relations of production and forces of production concerning how it provided capitalism with a paradigm shift. A pre-existing mode of historical and social production no longer sufficed for real capitalism–it has to subvert an old mode of labor production premised on reproducing labor-subjectivity (the subjection of labor to mere subsistence) as this subjectivity was structurally resistant to capitalism. Capitalism has to rely on a new mode of technology that can produce a new labor subjectivity, one that also allows for expressions of autonomy but strictly within a given sphere of production. This sphere of production is real capitalism itself that nonetheless digs its own grave precisely because the autonomous expression of labor is given a rare and real opportunity to subvert the sphere itself, real in the sense of the intensity of the conjugation of forces never been seen before in history. Such forms the background of the Communist Manifesto’s battle cry: “Workers of the world unite… You have nothing to lose but your chains.” The workers are the new abstract machines, a new people–deterritorialized from both the old but majority mode of production of subjectivity and the still obscure minority that is prone to homogenization by the stata. As a counter-hegemonic people, Marx knows that the workers as abstract machines are neither majority nor minority, but these machines are certainly a critical life-force of transformation yet as such exist nowhere on an existing plane of composition except as liminal subjects. They even ceased as workers in the strict sense of labor subjectivity as the new subjectivity is in principle opposed to already existing planes of composition. But eventually Marx, in his vision of a communist state, would settle for a strata reterritorialized by a formerly resistant but now triumphant subjectivity, the subjectivity of the abstract machines. As the abstract machines previously allowed for certain reterritorialization (which indicates that states or strata must themselves be protected from “demented or suicidal collapse”), even compromises with homogenizations (a case of negotiating with the contingencies of power), their eventual recourse to reterritorializing a plane of composition is no less based on the power of abstract machines to create a mythic plane of composition that has to be imagined in the sense that it can be justified as true, true in the sense that its origin is also to be justified as real, but real in the sense that it is intensively virtual. That is how a people justify their existence from liminality to an intensive desiring machine.

Certainly, as myth works behind this new constitution of a people, charismatic figures help to enact a plane of composition that is, to use Deleuze’s concept, already a second origin. I commend Zizek for rallying around the figure of Chavez, but Zizek missed the whole point. His obsession with individual figures is certainly a throwback of psychoanalysis that relies on tracing of subjects and not collectivities. It was not Chavez but the intensive spirit (recreated by a people across time, across consistent deterritorializing patterns aware of the danger of negativism, of plunging into chaos) of Simon Bolivar, himself a mythic figure of the unification of the Americas, reterritorialized by a people from the reterritorializing machine of states. (Thus, we can see here a battle of reterritorialisations of space). But charismatic figures are not the efficient causality that can win a revolution. Yes, we need to rally around them, certainly because we need to exercise fidelity (in Badiou’s beautiful formulation) to our choice as a people, our choice to pursue a second birth, perhaps, to generate a new conception of human, of god, of justice and redemption–that is to say, in the pure immanent sense. As I put it elsewhere, it is ‘a people’ that produces work from out of conjugation of forces, forces being the potential to perform a metamorphosis.

My panel session proposal has been approved by the organizers of the ISA which will hold its annual conference (2014) in Yokohama, Japan. Those interested to submit a themed proposal for presentation please check out the poster here. The panel I will be chairing in the conference is on “Religion in the Era of Climate Entropy.”

Zizek and the Nostalgia for Communism

What I am going to argue about may already seem a pointless remake of post-9/11 critiques. After a series of careful examinations of the phenomenon of terror, drawing on religious extremism, neoliberal capitalist democracy, and Western imperialism, such as Habermas’ and Derrida’s influential dialogue in Philosophy in a Time of Terror and Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, among others, any attempt to re-insert terror into the landscape of contemporary theory would seem to be reviving a topic already past its prime.

But only, I guess, if terror is an object of fashion. But certainly, terror can be revived as a specular image; an image that does not mind whether terror happens or not, or whether it happened or not. As Zizek would have it utilizing Lacan’s psychoanalytic lens, the point about the image is that it has the power to effectuate the Real. An image can either be imaginary or symbolic depending on one’s psychic maturity. All the same, an image is always attracted to the Real, like the real object of desire that cannot be had except by way of a substitute. It is the substitute that always does it for us: we desire because a substitute makes us capable of pushing our drives toward the object of desire.

Let me continue by stating that terror might have already exhausted its energy that fueled Western discourse—Western theorists are now composing theirs on themes of posthumanism, or climate entropy, arguably a new face of terror posed by Nature—still we may have missed the point that terror is always ready for an encounter and as such is the prototype of the Event. Here, we digress into Alain Badiou to make sense of the relation of the Real to the Event. We are talking about Badiou’s description of the key feature of the twentieth century, namely, its passion for the Real (The Century, 32). Slavoj Zizek describes this aspect of Badiou’s conceptual diagram as follows:

“In contrast to the nineteenth century’s utopian and scientific projects and ideals … the twentieth century aimed at delivering the thing itself, at directly realizing the longed-for New order. The ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality—the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp. 5-6).

We all know that for Badiou the Event is unpredictable, unlike Zizek’s notion of it about which we will discuss later. Because it is unpredictable the only recourse to make sense of the Event is to exercise fidelity to it but by way of a substitute, a substitute for the Event and its unpredictability by making it somehow predictable. In Badiou’s formulation, our fidelity to the Event or its unpredictability has to be matched by its complement in a deeply personal commitment to the impossible continuity of a choice or an act. One must continue to be loyal to the unpredictable by becoming unpredictable which in a nutshell makes unpredictability an axiom of choice. Perhaps, we can make sense of this axiom of choice by making reference to Deleuze and Guattari who warned us in A Thousand Plateaus that chaos can chaoticize and can undo every kind of consistency. (Whether D&G made their point well about putting chaos in a little order is another matter).

In other words, there is a way to negotiate with chaos. And it is not without its global implications that during the last 19th and 20th centuries negotiating with chaos was defined by a choice between socialism and capitalism, or socialism and barbarism, whichever you prefer.

Socialism or Barbarism

In the early years of the 20th century the Bolsheviks, inspired by the publication of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, set out to establish the first socialist state in history anchored on highly centralized planning. Incidentally, it was also premised on a highly personalized regime, driving the cult of personality that energized the Soviet Union well until its fall. When the Soviet Union collapsed it seemed then that decentralization and the impersonal rule of market forces, the opposite of central and highly personalized administration of things, held the right key to negotiating with unpredictability.

But the crisis that global capitalism confronts time and again belies the assumption that history has ended in the smooth rule of capital, especially after the collapse of Eastern socialist regimes when capitalism suffered its worst financial crisis since the Depression. The financial crisis that hit the Asian economies in the 1990s, on the up again just recently which took the European economy by surprise, altogether illustrate how chaos remains untamed (because given a free rein), typical of the capitalist mantra that competition is superior to central planning, individualism to the abstract collective, chaos to rigid organization.

Nonetheless, it is not difficult to grasp how chaos can still be tamed by taking it as a principle of organization. We can make sense of how chaos organizes a space of consistency, something akin to human resource management and development paradigm typical of corporate modernity, in terms of treating chaos both as presence and absence. This is especially true in a Lacanian space of individual determination defined by the logic of substitution that we earlier mentioned. Robert Lander, a student of Lacan, summarizes this logic of substitution anchored on the experience of anxiety, arguably what every conscious human being today feels about the future under global capitalism:

“When Lacan affirms that anxiety is the only subjective way to search for the lost object, he defines a paradox. What is sought is not the object but its absence, because its present absence introduces the signifier of lack. The phallus (as the signifier of lack) changes from a metaphoric to a metonymic signifier, for the lack (as phallic signifier) moves, circulates. It is everywhere and nowhere. Everyone may bear it and, at the same time, nobody does” (Subjectivity and the Experience of the Other, 27).

Let us try to unpack this Lacanian formulation in relation to chaos. We can initially state here that negotiating with chaos or unpredictability is taken up by the subject. But bear in mind that in Lacan the subject is an invention, that is, an invention of the subject by the subject out of the fundamental lack of self of the subject itself. Thus, we can speak of the subject as a substitute for an absent reference under which it can be placed. In Badiouan formulation it is equivalent to the act of voiding the Void. In any case, the Void when voided does not cease to be voidal. It continues to be voidal through the presence of lack, the presence of a substitute for lack. In the same manner by taming it through a substitute, chaos becomes chaotic.

And how else can we describe the chaotic other than through an organized operation that releases chaos from its absolute indifference to all forms of human signification? Before the invention of a substitute for it, chaos ‘chaoticizes’ without design. The substitution of a non-presentable presence (chaos before human signification) by a presentable absence (describing the principle of chaos through scientific or philosophical means) inaugurates the beginning of human history. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels knew how to frame this substitution within concrete historical struggles by stating that ‘individuals have always proceeded from themselves’, not from the outside, not from the untamed outside where chaos reigns. Obviously, they were able to state this logic of substitution in concrete terms after the fact, post factum, that is, after folding the outside in the inside, which in Deleuzian terms is called ‘memory’, more correctly, historical memory, the memory of the Void.

Voiding the Void

Throughout the course of human history, negotiating with chaos has to involve designing for human purposes how it ought to run its course. We are now properly entering the domain of human history which true to its fundamental sexual foundation has been hitherto defined by oedipal forms of asserting memory, of asserting a certain form of voidal dominance.

Again, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels state that the first sexual division of labor inaugurates not only the beginning of the division of labor, later perfected by capitalism, but above all, the birth of History. Expressed in terms of the Lacanian concept of subject formation history can then amount to a plane of composition that is already pre-defined by a ‘genetic axis’ or an ‘overcoding structure’ in which Oedipus, or the Name-of-the-Father, the supervising agency of the division of labor, is everywhere inscribed on the plane.

The plane is self-composed by Oedipus, a plane where no exit to non-Oedipal, non-historical, non-patriarchal, non-sexist, therefore non-human consistency is possible, which also explains by the logic of difference the frequency of rebellions from within. But these rebellions are already pre-defined by Oedipus: the plane of consistency is already saturated through constant oedipal act of voiding the void, of creating a vacuum from a vacuum, that is, of creating his story, whose ultimate form is Capital.

Let us continue here by adding that with the collapse of the communist project the Oedipal agency of Capital has proclaimed absolute victory over another oedipal rival. This only illustrates that anywhere there is history there is an exacting agency always ready to prove its mettle by voiding the void relative to its capacity for totality and homogeneity whose victims are always the other of Oedipus, mother, sister, brother or son and daughter whose figures take various historical and genetic forms such as the weak, the vulnerable, the malleable, the poor, the uncultivated, the savage, the East. The larger void this oedipal agency could void the larger its voidal dominion.

In this sense, the victory of Western capitalism over communism illustrates how aggressive its oedipal machine of voiding the Void is by totalizing all forms of voidal affirmation of existence. Yet, the defeat of the Eastern communist model has also deprived Western capitalism of an important part of its oedipal self-composition, namely, an Other to which the West gives the “privilege,” as Emile Cioran remarks in History and Utopia, “of realizing the unrealizable, of deriving power and prestige from the finest of its modern illusions” (14).

Hence, the plane of consistency composed by oedipal capitalism becomes threatened by mediocrity, banality, and loss of creative impulse, no less the mechanical life of everyday consumerist culture. We can argue here that this situation invites an opening up to an Event in the form of terror; in Freudo-Lacanian terms, the violent return of the repressed.

Whose return?

But whose return? Is it the return of communism? Or the return of the East, perhaps, exemplified by China and the threat of North Korea? Or the return of a humiliated Oedipus who wanted to repeat the process of desiring, in the same way a child longs to return to the mother’s womb, by ignoring concrete historical changes passing between him and the rest of the world, so he could play out without distraction his neurotic impulses where only his consistency is at stake, the absolute right of Oedipus to the object of his own desire, his delusion as the most important person ruling an imagined kingdom atop an oil-rich Sabah? 1. You will not be surprised to find out that it will be the same oedipal drive that would make this dreaded return.

As Zizek argues in his by now irritable treatment of the Lacanian formula for anxiety anchored on the death-drive, it is better to proceed here in a circular way for economic reasons than embrace a Nirvanic or Easterly return to pre-organic or pre-linguistic solitude of actual terror. He says in his recent work, roughly a decade after the 9/11 attack: “Nirvana as a return to pre-organic peace is a false vacuum, since it costs more (in terms of energy expenditure) than the circular movement of the drive” (Less Than Nothing, 945).

Zizek recently makes an interesting observation: “Every normality is a secondary normalization of the primordial dislocation that is the death drive, and it is only through the terrorizing experience of the utter vacuity of every positive order of normality that a space is opened up for the Event” (Ibid., 835).

The question is, “Is not the bombing of the Twin Towers an example of a ‘terrorizing experience of the utter vacuity of the positive (global) order’ in which the West claims absolute superiority after the collapse of the Eastern model?” Indeed, it has opened up a space for the Event, namely, in Zizekian terms, a return to normality. A certain normality is achieved when the return of the repressed guarantees that the Event does not fall into a trap, when it does not consciously mimic the death-drive. Instead, the death drive has to be obscured by the Event opened up by terror, by the attack on the towers, or the invasion of Sabah, in terms of transforming itself into a confused “semblance” of a void that preceded all voids” (Ticklish Subject, 154). It goes without saying that a preceding Void is the void of all Voids, which can never be voided.

The shape of today’s Marxism

This contrasts with Badiou’s formulation of the Event that attempts to go beyond oedipal capitalism by opposing the Event of Truth to the death-drive. For Zizek, there can never be a genuine passage from old to new as the Badiouan Event otherwise entails. What Zizek rather advocates is a violent enforcement of a passage: “no longer follow the pattern of an evental explosion followed by a return to normality” (“The Communist Hypothesis,” 130), something we can associate to the attacks on the Towers which gave capitalism the opportunity to stabilize itself rather as Zizek concludes: “Out of revolt we should shamelessly pass to enforcing a new order” (Ibid.). Jamalul Kiram III must have learned so much from Zizek. 2.

Here we are seeing the shape of today’s fantastic Marxism, with a Hegelo-dialectical Lacanian twist. While he at times denounces the fetishism of capitalism, the fetishism being its obsession toward an absent presence, its fascination for chaos as a principle of finality, as when he declares that “fetishism reaches its acme precisely when the fetish itself becomes dematerialized” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 36) we need to emphasize the point that for whatever it is worth Zizek’s critique conceals an apologetic tone.

The exposition of the dangers of dematerializing the fetish, which can be related to the passion for the Real or the Thing itself, or the ultimate object of desire, such as Kiram’s claim to Sabah, does not for purposes of psychoanalytic education prevent terror, rather, it does the opposite by rationalizing terror as a necessary violent return of the repressed, the necessary circularity of the drives in terms of avoiding the Ur-drive, the death drive, which nonetheless must be satisfied so as not to overwhelm the subject by transforming the push toward the object into a confused and unconscious semblance of death.

What can psychoanalysis teach us across the spectrum of global hegemony and forms of resistance if, on the one hand, the oedipal capitalist system of global subject-formation accommodates terror for it serves as the ontological buffer for the positivity of its normality, and if, on the other hand, global resistance to capitalism is having difficulty escaping a predefined space of determination where exit to nonhistoricality, to a body without organs, is still fraught with dangers, especially the danger of being co-opted by the oedipal war machine, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari? As far as Zizek is concerned, the only way is to repeat the same process that normalizes capitalism and the desire of Oedipus.

Having said these, I take it that left Lacanianism, the one exemplified by Zizek’s works, is the most promising shape of today’s Marxism, the form of communist utopia that alone can save global capitalism from diving into chaos.

Psychoanalysis and Its Conjurations

Charles Stivale, commenting on structuralism and psychoanalysis, once observed:

“Structuralism cannot be separated from a new transcendental philosophy in which the sites prevail over whatever fills them. Father, mother, etc. are first of all sites in a structure; and if we are mortal, it is by moving into the line, by coming to a particular site, marked in the structure following this topological order of proximities (even when we do so ahead of our turn).”[1]

Deleuze and Guattari are more straightforward while giving psychoanalysis its due:

“Psychoanalysis undoes them (myth and tragedy) as objective representations, and discovers in them the figures of a subjective universal libido; but it reanimates them, and promotes them as subjective representations that extend the mythic and tragic contents to infinity….Oedipus is the fallen despot—banished, deterritorialized—but a reterritorialization is engineered, using the Oedipus complex conceived of as the daddy-mommy-me of today’s everyman.”[2]

A reterritorialized existence is here correlated to the somewhat “lesser dangerous symptoms of psychosis” of today’s everyman.[3] Teresa Brennan in her work History After Lacan tersely observes: “One of the lesser symptoms of psychosis, like neurosis, is the inability to concentrate for very long, to constitute memories in a temporal sequence or to follow an argument.”[4] Seemingly, this succinctly describes the kind of subjective existence in modernity; rightly put—the “psychotic era” (as Brennan emphasized). One of the objective symptoms of this era is its fixation on subject-object schema that Deleuze and Guattari attempt to replace with the subject-concept schema or what they associate with “diagram.”

Diagram in turn is associated with “lines of flight” and “absolute deterritorialization.”[5] Diagram deterritorializes “presignifying regime”[6] or what can amount to “topological proximities” (Stivale) into which the subject comes if only to freely express its subjectification to certain “proceedings and assignations of subjects in language.”[7] “In this sense, psychoanalysis, with its mixed semiotics, fully participates in a line of subjectification.”[8] Thus echoing their critique of psychoanalytic ‘tracing’ or its topological redundancy, Deleuze and Guattari further assert, “The psychoanalyst does not have to speak anymore, the analysand assumes the burden of interpretation; as for the psychoanalyzed patient, the more he or she thinks about his or her next session, or the preceding one, the better a subject he or she is.”[9]

The psychotic era of involuntary, pretraced, presignified given strata of subjectification “carries desire to such a point of excess and unloosening that it must either annihilate itself in a black hole or change planes.”[10] When this “black hole of involuntary memory”[11] is reterritorialized as a form of pretraced memory, that is, as an organism, the subject becomes un-diagrammatically one with, in the sense of its voluntary submission (sealing the lines of flight or exits to creations), the pure untamed vitality of chaos that “undoes every consistency”[12] in the sense of impatiently “emptying [oneself] of [one’s] organs instead of looking for a point (a line of flight by means of diagramming) at which [one] could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call organism.”[13]

Deleuze and Guattari unequivocally warn against this kind of subjectification that risks “[dragging itself] toward catastrophe” by “not taking precautions”:

“Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous plane on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment….Connect, conjugate, continue…“[14]

As François Zourabichvili suggests in his commentary on Deleuze, staying stratified can amount to being “coextensive with oneself” in a manner that has since Descartes takes subjectification as a reflection of “autonomous and pre-existent inner life” as well as the “external reality” it reflects in the form of reterritorialized subjectivity.[15] But if Zourabichvili later speaks of a process of becoming “when the subject is no longer coextensive with itself[16] the rhetoric changes its effects. If we can juxtapose this process of becoming to the Lacanian notion of extimacy where, in an analytic situation, “the analysand at the end of his trajectory attains the question of being,”[17] at the same time that “the analysand finds there his or her entry into … the analyst’s discourse,”[18] his or her entry into the “analytic solitude… into a breach… where he or she is supposed to remain” [19] as a consequence of the paradox of psychoanalytic practice, then it is not so difficult to see that the question of being is either one of living in a permanent liminal landscape or that which offers a way out of the landscape in terms of becoming another subject, that is, as reterritorialized in the analyst.”[20] Against the whole analytic process itself Zourabichvili offers the following words: “the subjective form is inadequate when faced with the unformedness of becoming.” [21]

The kind of reterritorialization we spoke of concerning the analyst is best described in the following observations by Pierre-Gilles Guégen, commenting on Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII, by relating the “question of being” to the Lacanian notion of extimacy:

“From this perspective, extimacy refers to the analyst after analysis, no longer the placeholder of the Other that lacks, but as the positive remainder of the analytic operation. In other words, extimacy refers to the manner in which the analyst has been the partner of the drive.”[22]

The “analyst discourse” into which the “analysand finds his or her point of entry” after analysis is precisely where the analysand, having lost the analyst as a placeholder of the Other, is introduced not only into the question of being but also of the competence of the analyst who has pushed the analytic situation into that of a realization on the part of the analysand that the analyst is neither the Other that lacks nor does he possess the Other’s desire. The analysand is caught in a limbo after analysis but fortunately finds a point of entry, perhaps, an escape from the analytic situation which legitimates his liminal existence in the first place, into the difficult paradoxical situation of the analyst stripped of the trappings of the Other. Guégen adds:

“The Analyst of the School, once appointed, sees an open door leading onto a tightrope: ‘Will he be up to the task, or will he take a false step? Will he know how to tread the path? Here, experience is of no avail, but nothing can be done without having previously benefited from the accomplishment of an analysis and from the training that follows in its wake. How will he be able to walk the tightrope? As Lacan stressed, “It is not sufficient for a duty to be self-evident for it to be fulfilled?”[23]

We can easily relate Zourabichvili’s notion of unformedness to the Lacanian psychotic era. As an “inter-assemblage” of “lines of impoverishment and fixation,” Lacan’s psychotic era describes the “closure of the assemblage” itself, what could precisely create “states of inhibitions” that can “release crossroads behaviours,” unable to procure “an opening into consistency” where, as Deleuze and Guattari originally suggest, “blackholes resonate together or inhibitions conjugate and echo each other.”[24]

[END]

NB: In our next post (which may take some time after this one as I am currently engaged in completing a number of research papers) I will relate this Deleuzean concept of resonating blackholes to OOO’s obsession with objects, units, etc. Simply put, the logic of OOO is implicated in the kind of schema (subject-object) that Deleuze and Guattari sought to overcome. Despite its emphasis on objectality, OOO is still very much a part of this schema.

Also, there are quite a number of interesting discussions on the blogosphere on, among others, to what extent psychoanalysis can be utilized to advance the logic of OOO. This post is in part a response to this aspect of psychoanalysis.

Notes

[1] See Charles Stivale, “Appendix: ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism’,” in The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1998), 263.

[15] See François Zourabichvili, “Six Notes on the Percept (On the Relation Between the Critical and the Clinical),” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996), 196.

[18] See Piere-Gilles Guégen, “The Intimate, the Extimate and Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 271.

A hero of my undergrad days and still is as a wanderer like many others smitten by many worlds, many loves, many truths, many places; islands to question your shadow feet, continents to give way to new mysteries of the heart as only hearts can live on them–they give them a ‘reason’ to exist.

Today’s date, February 17, coincides with the day they killed Giordano Bruno. For years, he had been imprisoned for blasphemy, for practising magic, and for heresy. Execution was recommended, though he could have had a less tortuous death had he confessed to those charges. “I neither ought to recant, nor will I,” Bruno said.(1) So on this February day in 1600, they tortured the former priest, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer. Iron spikes were driven through his jaw, tongue, and palate. Bruno was pulled through the streets by a hooded, chanting group known as the Company of Mercy and Pity. He was stripped of his clothes, tied to a stake, and burned to death.

Born Filippo Bruno, he adopted the name Giordano when he entered the Dominican Order at a monastery in Naples, thirty kilometres from his family’s village near Italy’s western coast. Bruno was 17 when he began his studies…